'WHY', said Oscar our grey cat to me the other day, 'can't I sit on the table? Just explain it to me again.'

Of course he didn't really say it out loud. I've not gone completely barmy. But his look, his tail lashing up and down, and his hurt demeanour as he slunk across the kitchen spoke volumes. He had, for the umpteenth time, been removed from his favourite perch.

And of course I couldn't explain it. Because there is no way to explain to a cat why he is allowed to sit on chairs, stairs, carpets, bedroom furniture, the shed, the chairs and table in the garden and just about everything else in the house but is not allowed on the work surfaces nor the kitchen table.

Nor, come to that, the dining room table especially when it's just been laid and a layer of grey and white fur upon the cutlery is not appreciated.

'Well', I said to him, and not for the first time. 'You know the rules. The kitchen surfaces are out of bounds. It's not necessarily my rule. But I share a house with others and they don't appreciate the sight of a cat washing his bottom within inches of the butter dish.

'Nor do they welcome cat footprints in the frying pan or your less than savoury habit of trying to kick a flea out of your armpit just as the roast is taken from the oven.

'Not to mention the time not all that long ago when your tail was found in the mayo jar.'

We've had this talk before. We had it last week when he came in out of the rain and apparently did an energetic rumba all over the newly washed counter.

We had it just after I caught him digging his paws into the sugar bowl, then licking them before delicately inserting them again.

And we had it when we were alerted to the fact that he had somehow got his head stuck in an almost empty can of tuna and was banging away like a mad kettle drummer trying to get it off.

I suspect we will have this conversation until one of us is too old to care, and I suspect it won't be the cat.

Actually, I don't really care now. It doesn't worry me one bit, but it worries others.

Everyone is being indoctrinated nowadays about hideous diseases cats apparently carry about them which will, at the drop of a hat, migrate to the human form and cause numerous nasty symptoms hitherto confined to illustrations in old medical books.

'Cats bring E-coli into the house', said my 11-year-old granddaughter.

I annoyed her by asking if Ecoli was an Italian tom-cat but she was serious. Children are serious about such things.

She actually looks for the sell-by date on food now for goodness sake, as if I would try to slip an aged yoghurt past her lips, god forbid.

I rather object to poor Oscar being treated like Typhoid Mary. He's a neat and tidy cat with perfectly respectable manners.

He's also open and above board about his surface perching habits. Unlike his brother who wouldn't dream of sitting on the table, or so he would have us believe.

TJ sits on a chair with a smug expression on his face but I know the second the last bedroom door clicks shut he's up and down those counters like an Irish jig group.

Anything edible disappears in a trice, and the other day this included a rather nice dish of leftover fajitas, covered securely, or so we thought, with a thick tea-towel.

In the morning a large round chewed hole was found in the centre of the towel, the dish's contents were missing and elsewhere in the house there was the sound of a cat belching.

It's an on-going problem to try to persuade those who think that just because a cat isn't allowed on the kitchen surfaces it's perfectly alright to leave edible things lying around.

I have patiently explained that you wouldn't let Great Aunt Flo stand in a lion's cage just because you've told the lion time and time again that it isn't allowed to eat anything that moves around on its own volition on two legs. But nobody listens.

Cats are not thieves. Cats don't differentiate between pork chops in your shopping bag and Felix on their pussy plate. Cats are hunters and any meat, fish or fowl is fair game even if they have just polished off two sachets of Felix.

My ex used to work himself up into a 'bring back hanging' fury every time one of the cats transgressed his unwritten rule that he should be able to leave a large plate of traditional roast beef and all the trimmings on the table and go walkabout for as long as he wanted to.

Each time he returned to find a neatly licked white space on the plate where the beef or whatever had been we went through the same old trauma.

I never told him that one particular afternoon I had left a thick fillet of plaice on the table for a moment, whereupon the cat leapt up, grabbed it, and rushed out the door.

A pursuit followed and I finally cornered the cat and the fish in the bedroom and after a short wrestling match retrieved it almost intact. It's amazing what a bit of batter can cover up.

This was the cat which not only managed to get in through the window of the fish van which used to call weekly, but actually managed to stay hidden as the fish man drove off down the road to his next call. Now that's what you call meals on wheels.

If you own a cat you have to be prepared for all this and more.

Cat hairs have to become part of your diet. Especially if you own a puss like my late lamented Genghis Fluffy, whose favourite sleeping place was the round wooden salad bowl. And he wasn't too fussy if there was salad in it or not.