Gertie’s face set to smug as she sashays away after spider trick

Thirty-six years married last month. I’ve put the miles in. I’ll let you into a secret, even though they’ll probably rescind my Mad Old Bags Coven membership, but the truth is we just like to make things up.

Cats are even smarter than dogs and see no need for people-pleasing behaviour, says Susan

We usually learn at our mother’s knee. My mother, for example, driven mad by my picky behaviour with the morning toast, gravely informed me that if I didn’t eat the crust, I was helping Hitler win the war. It was 1965. Adolf was safely gone, defeated by the crust-crunching children of Britain.

She also told me that eating carrots helped you to see in the dark. It’s another Second World War tale, put about to explain the spectacular success of night-fighter pilots like Group Captain John Cunningham, who magically jumped and destroyed 19 Luftwaffe bombers on their way to blitz British cities. How did he find them in the dark? Carrots, said the Ministry of Information.

Brylcreme Boys can’t get enough of them. Improves the night vision no end. All nonsense, of course. It was an effort to hide radar, the real technology aiding the dark dog fighters. Also, there was a glut of carrots at the time, and the Ministry of Food wanted them eaten. Weirdly enough, there’s a grain of truth in the story. There’s loads of beta-carotene in yer average carrot and this helps support your eyesight, especially the bits that help you see in the dark.

In fact, many of the tales us auld yins tell do have some fact in them. Getting wet won’t give you a cold, but it will lower your immune system. Any bugs about will have a better chance of landing you in bed. Eating fish doesn’t make you clever, but eating oily fish is really good for your brain. Cracking your knuckles won’t cause arthritis, but it is incredibly annoying, so just stop that now.

Others tales are just plain bonkers, clearly created by post-menopausal women fed up watching their families doing mad things. Some woman somewhere watched her husband trying to teach the family dog how to do something new, and she knew what we all know. Yes, you can teach an old dog how to do new tricks, but dogs are smart. They’ve reached a good age by being cute, entertaining and doing generally acceptably doggy things. Why bother extending their repertoire just because the Master here saw a tap dancing mutt on Britain’s Got Talent?

The Crones Club doesn’t even mention the possibility of teaching a cat anything. Pointless. Cats are even smarter than dogs and see no need for people-pleasing behaviour. Anyway, it turns out some learn on their own. Our cat Gertie is 12. She has a new trick. She came up with it herself. She pads up to us and looks up with her big green eyes. And then, with sphinx-like inscrutability, she drops her head, opens her mouth and releases the massive live, intact and highly mobile spider. Then she stands back and watches the screaming.

Old wives say cats have no expression. For once, my aged sisters are totally wrong. That face was set to “Smug” as she sashayed away.