LIVING WITH A CAT is best described as a character-building experience. Living with five of them is the sort of thing that qualifies you for life membership at the local home for the terminally bewildered, not to mention the opprobrium you earn from dropping bags of used kitty litter down a six-story garbage chute.

All this occurred to me as I scanned a stack of electronics goods catalogues, trying to decide on a suitable radio to buy for a couple of our felines, Penelope and Teddy Bear. A Sony model produces a nice sound on Pachebel's Canon in D, but a little Toshiba handles Freddie and the Dreamers a wee bit better. Decisions, decisions...

This is not, let it be said, an exercise in frivolity. This is a matter of self-preservation, or at least prevention of death by sleep deprivation. Penelope, our 17-year-old Siamese, is blind, and she is wont to announce her journeys from food bowl to cat tray to sleeping basket by a series of yowls that would peel the skin off a rhinoceros.

Through astute observation, I've come to the conclusion that her caterwauling is far worse at night because, unlike daytime, it is utterly quiet then, and quietude is anathema to any self-respecting Siamese cat. It is an aural vacuum that must be filled - a task for which their vocal chords are more than adequately equipped.

The radio is the answer because it seems to act as a sort of noise companion that keeps her company. It works, for the most part - best, actually - on BBC Radio-2, which has almost normal, snare drum-free music, although Penelope still tends to bellow during "Religion Time" at 15 past the hour and at any time when Celine Dion is in full screech.

Penelope has the radio at night. In the daytime, it belongs to Teddy Bear, a great pile of tabby who we figure is 18 if he's a day and who arrived at our abode as a "rescue" cat a couple of weeks ago. He is slotting in nicely, didn't exactly need satellite positioning to locate the food bowls and was last seen sprawled in a cat cradle, back feet stretched skyward, dealing out the zzzzz's to a reprise of Simon and Garfunkel's best.

My wife, Elizabeth, is fond of quoting the anonymous descriptive of the average cat: "An egotistical, self-centered, serious opportunist " ("and that's why we love them," she adds). But it's worth adding, as anyone who owns - or is owned by - a cat can tell you, that co-existence with them is conditional upon your own behavior, starting with remembering who's running the asylum you once called home.

To cross one is to beg consequences that can be dire, or worse - and bear in mind that a cat has a veritable arsenal of revenge weapons. Our little Persian, Coco, took umbrage at the amount of time we were devoting to watching television. Her method of citing the folly of our ways was to climb on the TV set and barf down the screen during the final five minutes of an episode of "ER."

Cats also hate boredom and will take certain steps to alleviate it. For two or three nights running a few years ago, I returned to my apartment in Beirut to find the kitchen floor a booby trap of fragmented crystal, the remains of a set of a dozen glasses that for more than a decade of shuffling around the globe, I had managed to keep intact.

Until my lilac point Siamese, Flavius. got fed up with being left on his own. I cottoned on when I heard yet another crash and reached the kitchen just in time to see Flavius using his paw to gently nudge yet another of the crystal glasses over the edge of the drainboard where my cat-ignorant maid had left them to dry.

I'm hardly alone in this war with feline attention-getting. London animal expert Celia Haddon has a friend whose "rescue" cat Simba breaks into the cupboard and shoves out a few cans of food as a hunger alert. If he doesn't like what's on offer, he knocks the water bowl over in disgust.

Tigger, a gigantic Maine Coon cat weighing in at 18 pounds, does a ballet move not all that gracefully across a six-inch-wide mantelpiece, toppling statuary and other ornaments like so many tenpins. For an encore, he unhooks coffee mugs from a wooden mug-tree, then removes flowers from a vase one by one.

Cats are noted thespians. In my younger days a couple of centuries ago, I once accidentally knocked out one pet, named Fagan, with a dish I was using as a discus. Fagan recovered, but he was left with a bad limp in his left leg that earned him several tons of special kitty treats, courtesy of my badly softened heart.

Also my badly softened head. Three months later, he was still hobbling about - until one day when, not realizing I was watching from a window, he strolled past on four very healthy legs. The left one went the instant I hove into view, but by then my heart had resumed its customary granite-like state.

Celia knows of Tinker, a traffic accident victim left with a damaged - or so it seemed - front paw. "When lamb chops were around," she says, "he developed a colossal limp, meowing and holding up his paw piteously."

It was in Brussels a few years back that my three cats left me homeless for a time. One morning came a knock on the door of my apartment. It was the landlord, complaining that the sacks of well-used kitty litter that I was dropping down the garbage chute were hitting the basement and exploding like "big dung bombs" (except these "dung" bombs were a hit that began with "S").

Ah, well, it was time anyway for Oliver, Alicia, Tobie and I to up stakes for Hong Kong. Pan-Am managed to lose track of the three Siamese somewhere along the way - but that's another cat yarn for another day. Meanwhile, I've got two more cats waiting for their new radio...

Thought for the Week: So whatever happened to preparations A through G?

"Notes From A Tangled Webb" is syndicated by: