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When I joked with her about it, she explained that she wasn’t sentimental about that particular cat, but she gave it (and its predecessors over several decades) treats because of a lifelong trauma – Leningrad.

Briefly, she’d been a child during the siege, and the family had suffered terribly from hunger. They had a pet ginger cat, which they cherished. As things got worse, they spent weeks protecting the cat from the neighbours, who wanted to eat it (they lived in a Kommunalka, or shared apartment).

Her mother fell sick (probably from the effects of malnutrition, as she fed most of her ration to the children), and the two kids more or less realised that it had to be the cat or their mother – so the cat ended up being made into soup.

My landlady had then kept a ginger cat in the family at all times since the war, and always spoilt it – as a sort of atonement to the species.

(She had some awful stories about the siege, including describing how they had to help take a dead body to a collection point. The bodies and the ground were all frozen solid, so they were stacked in a place until the authorities were able to find time to dig graves. Apparently it was obvious that some of the bodies had been partly dismembered – presumably for food.)

Is that Red Army speak for sinking?