Stray ginger cats: the pros and cons of taking one in

It was six or seven years ago that I first witnessed a ginger cat break into my house. His name was Samson and, while "cat" was one description you might have applied to him, another, arguably more accurate one was "ginger beach ball that just happened to have a cat's head on top". Having established his identity, and that he belonged to Ruby, a lady in her 80s who lived across the road, the two of us became friends: me allowing him to steal my cats' biscuits, him allowing me to stroke him while staring up at me in a beatific, stoned kind of way. Had he been able to speak, I sense the vast majority of his sentences would have ended in the word "dude".

When Ruby died in 2009, a friend of a friend who lived several miles away adopted Samson. A strict diet followed, which, in the photos I saw, left Samson looking less like a beach ball and more like a smaller cat wearing a baggy ginger jumper. While he had been around, I had moaned a little about my extra cat food bills and feared for my armchairs and sofa – Ruby's were so violently clawed, you would be forgiven for thinking they had been slashed open in a police drugs raid – but in the year or two after he'd gone I missed him a lot. I had four cats of my own – then, after my large fluffy and intellectually challenged mancat Janet died in the winter of 2011, just three. All of whom, being either black or tabby, were either troubled and intellectual or troubled and narcissistic. I missed the "live in the moment" sunniness that you tended to get with ginger cats: their Buddhist approach to life's many stumbling blocks.

As it has turned out, I perhaps should have been a bit careful about what I wished for. In the past two and a half years, I've been visited by a succession of ginger cats, all of whom have been feral, and all of whom have proved costly in either an emotional or financial sense. The first of them was Graham. Graham – who had a similar moon face to Samson but was smaller and had fur whose condition spoke of a life of hard knocks – began making his nighttime raids on my house just over two years ago, during which he would steal biscuits and take a large piss, either on the blackboard in my kitchen or the W-X section of my alphabetically filed LP collection. After many months of trying, I finally managed to "befriend" him (aka block off my catdoor while he was in the house) and, with the hope of either adopting him or finding him a home, took him to the vet's and paid a large sum of money to have his balls cut off and get him tested for feline Aids and inoculated against various diseases. Not long after this, he escaped, which left me feeling a bit like a special charity for cat balls. He did return a couple of times, but only to take a retaliatory piss on my Bill Withers albums.

Graham's permanent departure was no doubt hastened by the arrival of Alan: a much larger, more sociable ginger stray, with whom he would often fight. The story of Alan has a happy ending, since he is now looking sumptuously upholstered and living in luxury next door with my neighbours Deborah and David. The only real losers in this are Deborah's shoes, which Alan often likes to wee inside, and my tabby cat Ralph, who has always been very small-minded about gingers and has started a minor race war with Alan in the foliage between our houses. I like having a cat called Alan next door because, when Deborah calls him in for his food at night, it gives me the mental image of her owning a small, middle-aged insurance broker whom she "lets out to play".

There was a short break in feral ginger activity while Alan first settled in next door, before the arrival of a cat I named Basil Bog Brush. This sour-faced, wiry-haired creature only hung around for a couple of weeks and my relationship with him progressed no further than me throwing cooked turkey at his feet and him ignoring it and miaowing at me like an angry ghost. He was replaced almost immediately by Mike, a shorter-haired ginger who looks a bit, in the words of my friend Will, "like he's swallowed a saucer".

I initially called Mike, whom you might say is more strawberry blonde than ginger, "The Wino", but I realise now that this was very unfair of me. He does have the appearance of a cat you might find bumming a cigarette off you or offering you a fight outside Costcutter, but once you get to know him, he's very sweet. My girlfriend was the first to break the ice with Mike back in early summer and, over the course of June, July and August, I gradually won his trust, until he'd actually come to me when I called "Mike!" at him. I was determined not to make the same mistake with him that I'd made with Graham. If I was going to get his – notably gargantuan – balls cut off, I should do it only when I'd properly won his trust, so he knew I was doing it for his own good. I would then find him a home.

I haven't seen Mike for several weeks now, though, and I'm worried. The last sighting of him was in early September: a forlorn face on the window ledge, encapsulating much of the sadness of homelessness in Cameron's Britain, staring in at me and my friends Dan, Amy and Pat as we played Trivial Pursuit. I went out and asked him if he wanted to join us, but he declined, which wasn't like him at all. I wonder now if I said something wrong, or if it was something to do with the fact that at the time Amy, Dan, Pat and I were listening to the 1971 album The Gipsy by the band Mr Fox, which, while an undoubted classic of the acid folk genre, can be a little abrasive. I've tried not to beat myself up about it, but I'm moving house in a fortnight and I have to face up to the fact that I might never see Mike again.

I've briefed the buyers of my house – cat lovers, thankfully – about Mike. It's one of those things that you do out of courtesy when you sell a house: you inform the people moving in about the best takeaways nearby, the nicest country walks, the code to the burglar alarm, and the local nest of ginger feral cats. He might come back but, if he doesn't, I feel certain he'll be replaced very shortly. I see the ginger feral cats who live near me as a little like the slayers in Buffy the Vampire Slayer: there should only be one in one area at any one time but, as soon as that one dies, a replacement will arrive. Sometimes, though, there's an administrative error, and you get two at the same time, and that's where the problems really start. It's complicated. But cats often are. That's one of the main reasons I like them.

Tom Cox's new book The Good, The Bad And The Furry is published today by Little Brown

Follow Tom on Twitter at http://twitter.com/cox_tom