MY friend is being haunted by her dead cat. This is not world-shattering news - she has been known to have odd notions before - but what shocked me, what made me question my very reason for being, was that she passed on this information with the firm conviction that I would understand.

She assumed that I was a cat person. Now, I have been called a lot of things in my time, few of which are printable in a family newspaper, but I am not one to take offence easily. Call me an old rat bag and I will brush it off with relative good humour, but call me a cat person and I might have to punch your lights out.

The only reason I didn't challenge my friend to a scrap (with hair-pulling and scratching and everything) was that we were at a children's party at the time and two mums rolling about in the car park squawking obscenities at each other would have been unseemly.

So I had to make do with staring at her in disbelief before launching into my best Robert De Niro impression: "Are you talkin' to me? Huh? You flippin' motherflipper."

My friend completely ignored the warning signs and blundered on about her former feline, Jasper, who I seem to recall was little more than a black blur when he was alive, constantly fleeing the sticky-fingered attentions of my chum's toddler daughter.

"I keep hearing the cat-flap banging in the night," she said, eyes wide at the horror of it all. "And I sometimes see a strange black shape out of the corner of my eye. But the worst thing is the cat hair. I opened a magazine the other day and a massive clump fell out."

Where she saw mystical problems, I saw tardy housework. The cat flap is broken (again); she's forgotten to put out the bin bags; and her living room could do with a bit of a clean. Fix it, chuck 'em, vac it. Sorted, without the help of a spiritual guide or a ouija board.

I didn't say any of this. She's been one of my closest friends for 30 years and our relationship hasn't lasted this long for me to suddenly spoil it all by breaking the habit of a lifetime and telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

I mean, where would it all end? Before you know it, I would be telling her what I really thought about her mother-in-law (she is not challenging, she's in league with Beelzebub), that she can't really do a believable Irish accent and that yes, occasionally, her bum does look big in that.

So I had to bite the bullet and pretend - moggy heaven help me - that I am a cat person. I have cats, I told myself, therefore I am a cat person.

"You know," I said as one cat person to another. "When I was a kid a medium told my auntie Dot that our cat Starsky was psychic."

And before you ask, yes I do have an auntie Dot who used to give most of her wage to a psychic and I did have a cat called Starsky. She was a vicious creature who hated being stroked and used to attack the milkman every Friday when he came round for his money. Happy days.

But back to my friend.

"The question you have to ask yourself," I said, "is whether your ghost cat is coming in or going out of the cat flap. Maybe he is simply trying to leave this world and go to that great cat litter tray in the sky, but your love is holding him here."

"You're right," she said, which is mystifying really as I don't believe in catty heaven any more than I believe in hippopotamus limbo or iguana hell. Cats are perfectly nice pets and then they die. That's it.

Thanks to me, however, my friend now not only believes her dead cat is haunting her, she also believes I am somehow spiritually attuned to moggies and the mysteries that await them in feline nirvana.

Just call me Mystic Mog.

Updated: 11:00 Monday, June 07, 2004