A Cat Called Birmingham by Chris Pascoe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This was a book I bought through a 3-for-£5 deal when I was in Dundee last year. It was a £1.6666 very well spent indeed.
Anyone who might have ever owned, lived with or generally loved cats will see so much truth in this little memoire. The very notion that individual animals of certain species possess varying personality traits is something we don’t really acknowledge. We might say “this cat is lazy” or ” How often haven’t we all generalised when talking about “vengeful, selfish” cats or “trusting, loyal” dogs?
Birmingham, or Brum, is proof that animals can have spectacularly, or should I say, catastrophically different personalities than anything anyone might have ever expected! Brum is so unfeline it’s surprising he’s a cat at all. The list of things this tabby has achieved is not short of extraordinary and even though living with such a cat could be dangerous to everyone involved, I think it would be a remarkably fun experience. I admit I’d pay good money to overhear a Yuki-Brum conversation or just watch them at play. Maybe they should do a Big Brother kind of thing with deviant pets instead of human sociopaths and see what happens!
A Cat Called Birmingham is a very funny book. It gets 4 and not 3 stars just because it made me actually laugh out loud more times than I remember any other book recently doing. Chris Pascoe hits the nail on the head a lot of the time with cats and how they can be such a great source of comedy. In fact, the book made me even more of a cat lover. You may be wondering: is that even possible? I thought it wasn’t; I was wrong. Such awww-inducing personal stories can’t but reinforce any sense of proximity and love there may be between the races of humans and felines.
