For International Cat Day: This is Sylvia by Sandy Wilson

One of the books I saved from my mother's house was This is Sylvia by Sandy Wilson. This review from the Brechin Advertiser (25 January 1955) explains all.

A nonsense book that is something quite new is the autobiography of that successful musical comedy star, Sylvia. Sylvia hesitated when her friends urged her to write her memoirs. She had lived her nine lives to the full, they said, so why not give her story to the public? Hester Briggs finally persuaded this great-great-granddaughter of a Sultan to take the plunge and tell her story up to now. As for the future, well as Hester said, Sylvia may only have got as far her eighth life yet. 

This is Sylvia (Max Parrish, 8/6) is the work of that remarkable young man, Sandy Wilson, who wrote the book, the lyrics and the music of the most successful musical comedy produced London for many years, The Boy Friend. As might have been expected from this talented author, This is Sylvia is like no other book, for this story of a cat of doubtful parentage, undoubted talents, ignorant but wise, popular and, of course. beautiful, embodies all that was ever meant by the successful musical comedy star the '30s and '40s. It is a candid story, full of wickedness, fashion, and foible, cunningly exposing the fatuity and elegance, follies and grace, weaknesses and strength of those who whirl among the bright lights. 

Each of the 54 illustrations, drawn Sandy Wilson himself, is a brilliant satire, and there can be few readers who will not delight in these memoirs of the recent past which he has successfully through Sylvia’s catty lips.” 

I suspect there are many contemporary references in This is Sylvia that we no longer get, but as a small boy I just loved the drawings of the cats.

Think of this post as my contribution to International Cat Day – though, strictly speaking, every day is International Cat Day.

Big cat found in plant pot after two-month search

BBC News wins our Headline of the Day Award for this story from Norfolk.

A Savannah cat, like the one in the picture here, is a cross between a domestic cat and a small wild cat from Africa called a serval. So this one was probably rather on the small side for a big cat.

But, as one of the judges remarked, this does prove that they're out there.

Blondie: Sunday Girl

Here's something I didn't know: this chart-topping Blondie single from 1978 is an elegy to a lost cat.

Sunday Girl was written by the band's guitarist Chris Stein about Debbie Harry's lost cat Sunday Man. He once told Jools Holland:

"The cat ran away and we were very sad. It was just a sort of plaintive, evocative number."

This is not the first such record to feature here on a Sunday. Henry Gross wrote Shannon about the death of a red setter that belonged to Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys.

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Simon Nixon reviews Hettie O'Brien's The Asset Class: How Private Equity Turned Capitalism Against Itself: "This is an industry that takes the private part of its name with deadly seriousness. It usually exercises total control over its operations, deploying financial muscle rather than charm to enforce submission and cloaking almost every aspect of its business – the provenance of its money, the performance of its companies – in secrecy. Yet over recent decades, private equity has quietly captured vast swathes of the economy and accumulated political power for which it is rarely held publicly accountable."

"For a long time, peatlands were treated as marginal, soggy places at the edge of more useful land. Peatlands are now becoming central to climate regulation, water security, biodiversity and the livelihoods of many people who live on and around them." Alice Milner on her research into peatlands and tackling climate change.

Norman Baker explains why buses in central London are slower than their horse-drawn counterparts were more than a century ago. He also has suggestions for speeding them up.

Danny Chambers is campaigning against the cruelty often involved in breeding what are, to my eye, ugly animals. "Across the UK, more and more dogs and cats are being bred to look fashionable or cute. But this can come at a serious cost to their health and welfare."

"The film encompasses many influences – neorealist working-class documentary in its early Belfast set street scenes; poetic realism in its studio-bound aspects and fatalism; noir thriller; and expressionist reimagining of Greek myth, as a fatally wounded Johnny is left behind in the botched escape and a rogue’s gallery of the city’s denizens alternately help and hinder his path through the Underworld entries, bars and rain-slicked slums of a darkened, almost Dickensian city." Tim Pelan sings the praises of Carol Reed's Odd Man Out (1947).

"As time went on, I felt more in control of the thing, and stopped fearing that I was going to show myself – and all womenkind – up, by passing out from the heat, more relaxed and more appreciative of the experience. The engine is indeed a star. There were waving people on every bridge, and we passed a campsite with lots more waving people. I got so keen on waving back to them that I almost forgot my job." Stephanie Gaunt learns to drive a steam locomotive.

The Market Harborough woman who gave birth to a cat

Agnes Bowker, the Market Harborough woman who claimed on 16 January 1569 that she had given birth to a cat, is the subject of the latest short podcast in the BBC's Secret Leicestershire series.

The photograph shows the ruined church of St Mary in Arden by Market Harborough railway station, where the story begins.

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Jess Asato, Labour MP for Lowestoft, says AI nudification is the latest weapon of violence against women and girls: "Using AI to strip a woman of her clothes is the modern equivalent of locking her in stocks in the town square and throwing rotten fruit at her. It is a weapon of shame, designed to humiliate. Like other pillories, it is meant to send a message to everyone else: do not do what this woman has done."

"The shortage of legal children’s homes across the UK is fast becoming a national crisis. Last week, a Public Accounts Committee report revealed that nearly 800 children were sent to live in illegal accommodation in 2024, staying an average of around six months each." Gareth Davies and Tom Wall report on a national scandal.

Chris Grey on Donald Trump, Greenland and Mark Carney: "Carney’s speech can be read as a general prescription for middle powers, of which the UK is one, in the rapidly emerging new order. It can also be read, not coincidentally, as a devastating repudiation of the core propositions of Brexiters and of Brexitism."

Emma McClarkin argues that Britain's tax regime is forcing pubs to raise the price of a pint.

"After she finished The Left Hand of Darkness in 1968, she worked for Eugene McCarthy’s primary campaign, stuffing envelopes and writing newsletters in his Oregon field office. In 1972, recovering from the first draft of her novel The Dispossessed, she did newsletters for McGovern." Julie Phillips on Ursula Le Guin the political activist.

"As I walk, I wonder what one ought to put on the grave of a cat." Natalie Guest visits Ilford pet cemetery.

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"The costed tax rises at £26bn are remarkably similar to the £27bn tax increases proposed in the Lib Dems manifesto last year. ... This would suggest that the macro management of the economy is broadly going in the direction we would want, although the methods aren’t necessarily of our choosing (insert gag about Morecambe & Wise and André Previn here)." Matthew Pennell gives a Liberal verdict on the budget.

Diane Ray reveals the chronic miseducation of working-class children: 'As one Head of English in an academy told me in 2023: “if you are working class and in the lower sets for English you have no access to books, novels, poetry or plays, but rather a daily grind of basic literacy worksheets'."

Waterlooville was labelled a "dystopian zombie drama" in 2024, but the Liberal Democrats have turned it around, says the Local Government Association Lib Dem group.

"Researchers from the Museum of London Archaeology are tracing the history of human habitation on the banks of the River Thames through strategic trial pits and boreholes. As evidenced by the flints, the land today occupied by the Palace of Westminster was once a gravelly island called Thorney Island that prehistoric communities used to fish, hunt, and gather food." Richard Whiddington reports from beneath the Palace of Westminster.

Tim Pelan on John Huston's 1975 film The Man Who Would be King: "The pleasure of the film is the old-fashioned exotic-seeming sensibility of the setting, harking back to classic old adventures like Lives of the Bengal Lancers and Gunga Din, but with the acerbic undercutting of white colonial arrogance."

Oxford Clarion presents an invaluable guide to the university's college cats. (I like cats because they don't use unnecessary commas or award themselves unearned MAs.)

Passenger fined nearly £100 after cat ‘miaows too loudly’ on train

The Independent wins our Headline of the Day Award for this story from France.

The guardian of St Walburgha's Church, Plowden

Not my photograph, but this is St Walburgha's Church at Plowden in Shropshire. Because the Plowden family remained Catholic after the Reformation, it's a Catholic Church.

I'm not certain when I visited it, but I think it was on the day I first saw Bishop's Castle after walking there from Church Stretton. If so, it was in June 1989.

While I was looking round St Walburgha's, an old farm cat with torn ears came in to see what I was up to. I fancied he was a sort of feline Brother Cadfael: after travelling the world, he was devoting his final years to caring for this little church.

The four coalfields of Shropshire (with help from a cat)

 As the blurb on YouTube explains, there are four coalfields in Shropshire:

• The Denbighshire field, which stretched from Chirk to below Oswestry.
• The Shrewsbury field, which included the town of Shrewsbury, Hanwood, Cruckmeal, Condover, Leebotwood, Pontesbury and Westbury.
• The Coalbrookdale field, which focused on Arleston, Dawley and Madeley but ran to Oakengates.
• The South Shropshire field around Highley and the Clee Hill, but running into the Wyre Forest.

The Shrewsbury field provided the coal that powered the lead mines of South Shropshire and, while I knew that coal had been mined on Clee Hill during the second world war, I didn't realise there had been opencast working there so recently.

The commentary sounds authoritative, but at various points a cat takes strong exception to it. It's worth a listen just for him.

Former sheriff candidate to face trial for allegedly registering cats to vote

KTLA, a Los Angeles television station, wins Headline of the Day:

A man who ran for Ventura County sheriff will stand trial for allegedly trying to register four cats to vote.

Bruce Boyer, a Chatsworth resident, is accused of trying to register four cats to vote ahead of the 2024 election. He pleaded not guilty to those charges earlier this year.

As detailed by the Ventura County Star, Boyer allegedly tried to enroll Cool T. Cat, Estrea D. Tigre, Fritz T. Cat and Sylvester T. Cat as voters.

My own view is that cats are certainly intelligent enough to vote, but because they're anarchists I wouldn't trust them to turn out on the day.

Quicksilver and Quince: Two cats who shared a bank account

This clip from 1973 is lovely. Two cats who share a bank account and use it to make donations to good causes.

If you wanted a picture of Britain in the Seventies, you couldn't do better than watch old editions of Nationwide. Yes, there were strikes, but there was much more besides - the rise of consumerism and environmentalism, and glorious pieces of eccentricity like this.

Thanks to Alix from the Shropshire Witches Podcast for posting this on Instagram.

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"The UK AI Action Plan quite explicitly encourages building up a greater tolerance for 'scientific and technical risk'. This is the language and ethos of venture capital investing, but with government funding: ”move fast and break things” on the path to AI dominance." Elke Schwarz says the British government has thrown caution to the wind in favour of an uncertain, speculative benefit.

Amanda Dylina Morse says youth workers can be powerful counters to figures like Andrew Tate and provide a positive example of manhood.

Andrew Pakes, Labour MP for Peterborough, introduces his co-operative housing bill: "Co-operative housing sits in stark contrast to the exploitative rental market or unaffordable home ownership, because the model gives power and control to the people who live there."

"In 1958 the Roman Catholic archbishop, John Heenan, was stoned while visiting a sick woman at her home off Netherfield Road; in 1967, prime minister Harold Wilson, a Merseyside MP, advised against Queen Elizabeth attending the consecration of the city’s new Roman Catholic cathedral for fear of a Protestant backlash. In the following year, Protestant Party candidates were again elected to seats on the city council." Ian Cobain on the evaporation of sectarianism in Liverpool.

Jeff Swim goes wandering through pagan Wiltshire with Richard Jefferies: "The Uffington White Horse ... showed me that paganism, as it is expressed in Jefferies, is an aesthetic of the process of walking the countryside and seeing things scurry in and out of view as you proceed, of seeing lines and figures take shape as you move with them."

At last! I've found a site celebrating cats in cinema and television: Cinema Cats.

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"Part of this is down to the increasing centralisation of politics. The prime minister’s role has expanded dramatically over the decades, and cabinet government has been a fiction for a long time (Nigel Lawson claimed that cabinet meetings were the only time during the week that he got a rest). Even minor departmental decisions now have to be signed off by the centre and slotted into a communications grid." Sam Freedman on the rise and rise of political advisers.

Luke McGee suspects Putin is up against his biggest opponent yet - Trump's ego: "Trump clearly wants something that looks like a peace deal so he can show off what a great negator he is. If Trump now sees Putin as the block to a deal, that is a problem for Putin, as he has to make a choice between looking weak domestically or losing whatever goodwill he had with Trump’s White House."

"Yes, Pecksniff and Trump are bullshit artists of the highest order and neither ever experiences the least bit of remorse." Robin Bates argues that Charles Dickens, with Mr Pecksniff from Martin Chuzzlewit, anticipated Donald Trump.

Ray Newman watches Some People, which was made in Bristol in 1962 with a young cast including Ray Brooks and David Hemmings: "The church opened in 1956 and was typical of the space age houses of worship built on overspill estates all over the country in the post-war period. Unfortunately, though it looked astonishing, it was plagued with structural problems and was demolished in 1994, which only adds to the value Some People holds as a record of a time and place."

Benjamin Poore says that Shostakovich spoke truth to power - both Nazi and Communist - through his Babi Yar Symphony.

"Without any particular training, the animals - like human babies - appear to pick up basic human language skills just by listening to us talk. Indeed, cats learn to associate images with words even faster than babies do." Christa Lesté-Lasserre discusses a study that supports my view that cats are much cleverer than they choose to show us.

Palmerston the Foreign Office cat accepts an overseas posting

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Forget Larry: we all know whose territory Downing Street really was. It belonged to Palmerston, the Foreign Office cat.

This afternoon came this exciting news from the BBC:

Palmerston, the former resident cat at the Foreign Office, has been brought out of retirement for a new overseas diplomatic posting nearly 3,500 miles away in Bermuda.

A post on Palmerston's X account, announced the black and white rescue cat - who served as the chief mouser Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) between 2016-2020 - had moved to the British Overseas Territory as "feline relations consultant".

Palmerston's account claimed he had been "lured out of retirement" by "diplomacy and a purr-fect role" with Bermuda's new governor, Andrew Murdoch.

Murdoch, a contemporary of Palmerston at the Foreign Office, has owned the famous cat since his retirement.

Welcome back, boss.

Dramatic rescue in Market Harborough High Street

Hurry over to Harborough FM for the full story and lots of pictures:

Concerned members of the public alerted Leicestershire Fire and Rescue Service this morning and firefighters arrived on the scene at around 10.30am to start a rescue operation which took two-and-a-half hours.

With Dante proving difficult to coax down via a ladder, a passing roofer in a cherry picker offered to help and the male cat was eventually rescued just before 1pm.

Layla Moran's Murphy robbed in vote to find Parliament's Top Cat

Disappointing news this evening: Layla Moran's cat Murphy ("The most Experienced, Character-filled and Determined cat in the race" - L. Moran) finished runner up in the contest to find Parliament's Top Cat.

According to a news report from the organisers, Battersea Dogs & Cats Home, the contest was won by Mr Speaker's cat Attlee by only 40 votes.

Now, I'm not saying that Attlee used his occupancy of Speaker's House to pull strings, but shouldn't he come forward and clear this up once and for all?

Vote for Layla Moran's Murphy: Other cats can't win here

Battersea Dogs and Cats Home has opened its Purr Minister contest for 2024. It sees politicians' cats competing in a public vote to draw attention to animal welfare issues.

Running an eye over the runners, there's only one choice for the loyal Liberal Democrat. Step forward Murphy, a 21-year-old veteran belonging to our own Layla Moran.

Among the opposition are Mr Speaker's Attlee and the Bishop of Newcastle's Ebba.

UK experts warn against buying ‘XL bully cats’

The Guardian wins our Headline of the Day Award.

The judges ask why there is now a mania for strange breeds when the domestic cats we know and love are so beautiful.

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"Council estates are not Labour. Tower Estate, which had Labour councillors continually for almost five decades, now has three Lib Dem councillors all elected on around 50 per cent of the vote. Lincoln’s Liberal Democrats have proven we can win anywhere." Darryl Smalley says it’s time for us to march into the council estates.

Andy Cowper on the Darzi review of the NHS: "It’s interesting how much the Darzi review emphasises Lansley’s NHS reforms. It’s also politically smart, because they were a total failure. Choice, competition, and clinical commissioning achieved nothing in the English NHS over the past 12 years. The Darzi review’s main, unstated purpose is about the allocation of political blame. It does that quite effectively."

"The first government minister who kept a cat with him when on government business was Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Lord Chancellor to Henry VIII. It was said he travelled with a number of cats, took them to Mass and that they sat in at meetings with him. The statue of Cardinal Wolsey in Ipswich shows a cat peeping around his robes." Nicola Cornick sets out the long history of political cats.

"Despite the grave fate that awaits Mary, for the most part Yield to the Night is a quiet film that relies on the emotional dexterity of its star for a narrative engine. At every juncture, Dors was not just convincing, but compelling. It was a mammoth, and yet searingly intimate, performance." Chloe Walker celebrates Diana Dors' wonderful performance in the anti-death-penalty film Yield to the Night (1956).

Matt McManus wants the left to read the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre.

Shroppie Mon will tell you all about a Shrewsbury dragon.