Andrew Miller: What our cats can teach us about living the purr-fect day

“The cat’s used the new tray on the toilet!” my wife called out excitedly.

Facts are important. Veracity.

“I don’t think so,” I replied.

There is only one reality, though we apply our different biases to it.

“They did, I can see that they peed in the litter.”

“Well, someone did.”

These cats are killing me.

I don’t mean that figuratively — they are doing it in plain sight. When confronted, one of them confessed in smiling, dark whispers that no-one else could hear. “Finish you slooowly” she yawned, having a big stretch.

The latest nonsense around here is something called a Litter Kwitter.

It exploits the feline instincts for hiding their output, and their famous dexterity, to train them to use a standard human toilet. Fine theory.

Cat toilet training systems now come with instructional videos and influencers. The hardware consists of plastic donuts with holes of increasing size. They hold litter over the toilet bowl, getting them accustomed to the facility. Eventually they get used to using the hole, rather than the litter in the shrinking outer donut.

However, neither cats nor people are into consistent training. We are often just not in the mood. Like water, we prefer the path of least resistance.

So it was that I found myself — a professional person of mature years — deciding whether to remove the donut litter tray from the toilet, or to instead try peeing through a hole the size of a grapefruit. I did what most men would do.

“I don’t know how to put this...” I said to my wife, who deserves so much better.

I never find it easy to admit that I was wrong, even though error is my modus operandi.

In medicine, the outmoded but persistent cliche is “see one, do one, teach one.”

The day that Alexandra Welborn was instructed to take my blood sample, during our medical student pharmacology lab days, we had not even “seen one” as I recall. We were not the ideal team — we shared a tendency to fall about laughing in strange situations.

How little we knew then of how little we knew — but we could laugh inappropriately during torture.

Alex went on to become a renowned psychiatrist — servicing the impossibly complex machinery of awake brains — while I made a career in pharmacology for the unconscious.

She once pondered — toward the end of medical school — “do you think we will all keep in touch, after we leave university?”

“Probably not,” I replied with the eager honesty of someone a little too practised for exams. I gave the correct answer, instead of the right one — “we should.”

I regret not staying much closer to many of the great people I have known over the years. It is an important mistake, easily made.

After my father died from haemochromatosis — a genetic condition leading to toxic iron levels in the body — I began frequenting the rooms of Malcolm Webb — haematologist, master phlebotomist and jovial amateur philosopher.

He still sticks needles in my arm periodically. We talk about life and the inadequacy of medicine and politics, as my sticky blood — the blood of my father — siphons into a plastic bag on the floor.

Malcolm told me that someone once asked him to picture his perfect day. Maybe coffee by the beach, a book, and conversation with people who care about others.

The advice was — don’t hesitate — to try and fit as many of those things as possible into every single day right now.

“Alex Welborn told me that,” he said, completing a small circle.

Alex and Malcolm are good doctors who treat people, not diseases; who try to avoid mistakes by understanding their own human biases, and taking a bigger perspective.

“You can’t learn without making mistakes,” I told the cats.

They just yawned, and went back to enjoying their perfect day.