“WE never go to the cinema anymore,” moaned my wife, which is a bit disappointing for me because I explained the reasons in a previous edition of this column, which she either didn’t read or has forgotten.

So I tell her to try harder to keep up, and explain again that if I liked spending my evening around people who cough and rustle toffee papers, or chat while I am trying to watch something, or munch overpriced popcorn in my ear, then we could invite them to our house and save ourselves the bother of going out.

I don’t much like modern films, anyway, which mostly seem to be about pointless action.

But she put me under intense pressure to watch a film called A Street Cat Named Bob.

She had read the book and now really wanted to see the film, and I couldn’t think of a valid argument to get out of it.

Bizarrely, the certification information, which they always put up before showing you the film, said the reason for its 12A classification was that it had ‘moderate drug references’, but as far as I could see the story was more or less entirely about the horrors of drug addiction, including a harrowing cold turkey sequence and one of the characters dying of an overdose on a cold London street.

In contrast to this, you get plenty of cute sequences featuring Bob the cheeky ginger cat, a character remarkable for not being under the influence of Class A drugs.

The storyline is pretty basic. A drug addict called James is in the process of quitting heroin, but is not necessarily destined to succeed, and it is thanks to his unexpected friendship with Bob, a stray who wanders into his life, that he gets through his darkest hours.

It’s a corny (if mostly true) story with some weak obligatory love interest thrown in for good measure.

My consolation for being quite disappointed in the film was that at least you get to see nice cat stuff, which can only be a good thing in these troubled times.

While people are getting increasingly angry over things that aren’t worth getting angry about, and normally placid people are getting angry with the angry people, then it seems to me that cats are probably one of our biggest hopes of shaking ourselves out of it.

After all, it’s difficult to get angry when there is a cat on screen or on your lap.

However, the silly thing about taking ourselves off to the pictures on a cold and windy night, at no little expense, to sit with the wrapper rustlers, all so we could enjoy a cat movie, is we have two perfectly good cats at home, who would have provided the same therapy.

And if we had stayed in with them, they would have enjoyed their evening more, as well.

We didn’t need Bob, really, when we have Poppy, our gorgeous but timid black cat.

And there is no greater light relief available than being with Alfie, the cheeky black and white one with the splodgy marks on his face, who is comically mesmerised by the noises the DVD player makes; likes to wander from the back to the front garden, but then can’t remember his way back, so gets stranded; and has recently developed an all-consuming fascination with what might be up the chimney.

This year has taught us the lesson that any twerp can achieve high office, and if I am lucky enough to be one of the twerps who does, everybody had better start liking cats, because I am going to make them compulsory.