I was going to give this book an unqualified welcome, and recommend it heartily - especially to single people of any gender who have survived another round of Christmas and New Year cheer and could do with cheering up.
There is, however, one important qualification. You should not, under any circumstances, attempt to read Making the Cat Laugh while travelling on any form of public transport, or you may well - take it from one who knows - be turned with horrifying rapidity from a normal, dopey, mildly glum commuter into one of those people who dribble and mutter to themselves on the DART.
Not being a regular reader of the Woman's Journal, in which she writes a monthly column, or even the London Times, for which she is a television critic, I had never heard of Lynne Truss; so I opened the book in all innocence. Twenty minutes later, helpless with laughter, tissueless and snorting, I put it away again and zipped my bag up firmly. Too late - surreal images kept flashing before my eyes, like the moment when Truss grabs her cat by the shoulders and demands, "You've got to tell me something. If I died, would you eat me?"
In the course of her tart observations on life as she - definitely she - is lived, Lynne Truss embraces a wide range of topics, from TV quiz shows ("Question: `It's eaten from a plastic bowl on the floor, by a pet that likes to go for walks'. Answer (tentatively): `Dog? Er, dog? Is it?' Question: `Hmm, I'll let you have it, but the answer I really wanted was dog food...'" to English as spoken in a spanking new phrase book purchased by mistake while on holiday in Italy, the kind intended for Italian visitors to England, not the other way round ("The lonely Italian visitor in search of a girlfriend proceeds at once to a dance hall. `Dhis tiun is veri na(i)s, isn't it' he says to his partner... Encouraged to dabble in less formal English, he tells his new lady friend she is `(e) na(i)s litl bit ow guuz' (a nice little bit of goods). Something about all this makes me intensely worried on his behalf
Truss lavishes gently sardonic attention on numerous odd corners of admittedly middle class life - snails, Blue Peter, Jim Morrison's grave and Michelle Pfeiffer in Batman Returns - and she has, it must also be admitted, a lamentable and unavoidable devotion to the (presumably) real life cats of the title. But her creation of that fictional, yet heart stoppingly recognisable character, "the single woman at home", makes Lynne Truss a truly inventive comic writer. And if you're shaking your head already, in anticipation of unadulterated angst, fear not, for here is a creature of multiple moods.
It would be a shame to give too much away, but to get the tenor of it try the column which begins "I have started getting a bit peculiar in Sainsbury's"; or the one in "which she describes, with the help of some deftly inserted quotes from the last act of Hamlet, the horror of looking after some plants for a friend who has gone on holiday; or the piece which a moment of blinding epiphany in the life of the newly single. "You feel a great warmth aside on the day you realise that if you haven't finished the marmalade there is still some marmalade left."
