The pub cat at the Fox and Hound in a village outside York has, according to every regular, an unshakable habit of sitting on whichever newspaper section nobody wants to read that day. "Sports today," Old Ronnie announced, watching the cat settle directly onto the back pages, unmoved. "United lost again. He knows." I thought this was just barroom nonsense the first few times I heard it, until I started actually tracking it over a couple months of pulling pints there part-time. Sports on match-loss days, weather during a heatwave nobody wanted reminding of, once, memorably, the entire obituary section the week two regulars died within days of each other. "He's not predicting anything," the landlord told me, refilling a pint without looking up. "He just goes where nobody's holding the paper down. People avoid the bad news pages, leave them loose on the table. Loose paper's easiest to sit on." "That's less fun than the alternative explanation." "Most true things are," he said. Ronnie disagreed loudly from his usual stool, insisted the cat had "a nose for misery" and had proven it for eleven years running, refusing every rational explanation offered to him with real personal offense. The cat, entirely unbothered by the debate happening over his head, was at that exact moment sitting on the horoscopes. "Go on then," Ronnie said, triumphant. "Tell us what that means." Nobody had an answer for that one. The cat didn't offer one either.