Who needs a therapist when you’ve got a cat — I’m feline fine

If a cat rolls over onto its back, does it catsize?

This is one of the many baffling questions I’ve been mulling since coming into ownership of a jet-black one-year-old shorthair named Hiccup, who my girlfriend Saskia and I liberated from Battersea Dogs & Cats Home last month.

For the past week I’ve had to look after him alone while Saskia’s been away, and it has been an exercise in accelerated maturity. Parents, at risk of offending you all, I don’t know how we do it. Is he watching how I unlatch the kitchen windows? Is it OK to watch BBC’s Dynasties with the lions in front of him, or will this give him ideas? I am a nervous catstodian.

“Honestly, I worry about him all day,” I texted my mum. “I know the feeling,” she replied.

Having never owned an animal larger than a goldfish before, I find him endlessly fascinating while, for the most part, he regards me with mild disdain. This is fine. Many major studies have shown how eager we are to anthropomorphise everything from our pets to our toasters

(Mr Burns, in our case). A more interesting study has, in the past month, shown just what they might say about us in return.

Researchers from the University of Liverpool found that while dogs look like their owners, cats behave like them. The findings, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, were possible thanks to the recent development by another group of scientists of a personality test for cats. Known as the feline five, they are friendliness, dominance, spontaneity, neuroticism and how outgoing they are. “Our results suggest that owner personality may have an influence on the type of cat a person is first attracted to, or the decision to maintain ownership of the cat,” says the report.

Closer to home, Hiccup is a show-off, skittish around people he knows, gobbles his food in seconds and then complains that there isn’t any more. Who needs a therapist? Get a cat.

We wish you a corny Friendsmas

Each year before Christmas, my friends and I descend on a rural Airbnb for the weekend, before going to do battle with our families.

Box-white trainers are missing, presumed dead, along muddy paths, carols are sung at neighbour-defying decibels indoors, wine is decanted into the carpet. We sound awful, but at least we’re out of your way. More excruciatingly, high-street brands have tried to dub this “Friendsmas”, to shift yet more festive tat. It smacks of marketing’s most crapulent idea, cooked up the morning after their own office party. But these close relationships are priceless. Pals are for life, not just for friendsmas.

Need cash fast? Value your exes’ gifts!

What is a relationship worth? I have just watched a play wrestle with a pertinent question for any cash-strapped millennial in December: could I cash in such a relationship to pay for a late utility bill?

Haley McGee’s one-woman show The Ex Boyfriend Yard Sale, at Camden People’s Theatre, saw her apply research by mathematician Melanie Phillips (not the columnist) to calculate a value for eight gifts given to her by separate former partners, including a bicycle, typewriter, and mix CD, which she’d needed to sell to pay off her Visa bill.

It was a brilliant concept, with shades of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag. McGee, armed with complex algebra, weighted each relationship by value added to her life minus emotional cost. The CD — a gift from her first boyfriend — went for £2,000.

A beguiling idea for anyone struggling with a tax return due in January, and a timely point about self-worth. In an age where lives can feel depreciated by the sheer volume of other stories to compare your own to, it’s appropriate to remind ourselves we set our own values by the lives we touch. Still, who would you cash in?

K-pop’s Swift rise spawns a leg-end

Here’s a tip for Christmas number one. BTS are the first K-pop group to be nominated for a Grammy. In Shanghai for a business trip, one local explained the enormity of the K-pop phenomenon in Asia to me, and the devotion that bands inspire. “One group was sent a human leg, as a gift,” they said. “No one ever found out if it belonged to the sender.” It makes the man who broke into a Taylor Swift property, took a shower, then fell asleep on the sofa seem a bit wet.