Have you ever used ‘kitten’ as a term of endearment?

Chanel’s Creative Director Karl Lagerfeld does, and he won’t accept his age (77) gracefully. More power to him – he gives hope to all the old fogies among us.

The fashion guru (tsar? mogul? – one can get terribly confused by today’s vocabulary) proves that age is no obstacle to romance and even to marriage. Yet one’s palms, about ready to come together in thunderous applause, stop midway when one realises that the person the guru/tsar/mogul wishes to marry isn’t, well, exactly a person.

It’s his beloved one-year-old Siamese cat Choupette. Those of you who may unfashionably think that such nuptial plans are a tad perverse must be reassured that Choupette is female. Yet even if she were a tom, one is no longer supposed to be judgemental about such matters. Love comes in all shapes and sizes and we must welcome them all.

In fact, Karl is a traditional gent who believes it’s a man’s duty to pamper and look after his beloved – no newfangled egalitarian notions for him.

He refers to the current love of his life as ‘his most valuable possession’, which is a charmingly dated approach to romance. And he’s as good as his word: Choupette has a large staff assigned exclusively to her.

This includes three ladies-in-waiting who record for posterity (and for Karl) everything Choupette does during the day. Since cats’ activities tend not to be overly varied, the recording duties can’t be too onerous. Just copy the words ‘sleep’, ‘eat’, ‘urinate’ and ‘defecate’, paste them into the text as appropriate – any modern 10-year-old could do it.

Obviously such a refined creature as Choupette deserves her own chef assisted by several sous-chefs. Together they develop daily menus of delicacies and serve them to their (and presumably Karl’s) mistress, as she reclines on a velvet cushion.

Like most modern celebrities, Choupette is a regular jetsetter. She has her own plane and follows Karl to all sorts of exotic locations.

A creature of her time, she also maintains a blog on Twitter which boasts 27,000 subscribers. “I’m Choupette Lagerfeld,” she identifies herself. “I’m a well-known beauty who won’t eat off the floor. I have a staff of servants who satisfy my every whim,” she boasts.

One may harbour a sneaky suspicion that Chaupette’s blog is ghost-written, but then how many celebrities do their own writing? In fact writing your own stuff is positively infra dig.

“I never thought I could fall so deeply in love with a cat,” comments Lagerfeld, but then love often does arrive unexpectedly.

The old-fashioned gentleman that Karl is, one wonders if he believes in sex before marriage. He probably does – even old fogies have to make concessions to their time. Not to worry: Karl can base his sexual practices on ample theoretical support.

For example, Peter Singer, Princeton professor of bioethics (whatever that means) allowed in 2001 that humans and animals can have “mutually satisfying” sexual relations.

“We are animals, indeed more specifically, we are great apes,” explained the good professor on the basis of frank self-assessment. Therefore such sex “ceases to be an offence to our status and dignity as human beings.”

Even earlier, in 1991, the Dutch professor Midas Dekkers wrote an academic treatise Dearest Pet: On Bestiality which adds a whole new meaning to the concepts of heavy petting and indeed of Midas touch. Bestiality now rests on a firm scientific foundation.

According to these scholars, sex has no ethical aspect at all – it’s all about feeling, love, passion, that sort of thing. By inference, no object of such romantic emotions can possibly bring them into disrepute, and they are all worthy of being sanctified by marriage.

Unfortunately for Lagerfeld, his country of residence, France, has so far only travelled that road halfway: it still balks at allowing interspecies marriage. But exponents of the thin-end-of-the-wedge theory know that another expansion of marital bliss can’t be too far in the future. A few more years of Hollande’s government in France (and Dave’s in Britain) will guarantee the ultimate emancipation of love.

And why on earth not? If we are nothing but ‘great apes’, better than some, worse than others, why shouldn’t we be allowed to marry animals?

We may be more intelligent, but the Singers of this world have a ready argument. Only some of us are more intelligent than say chimps. What about brain-damaged or severely retarded people? Those in a coma? Some of them are no brighter than Choupette, so there goes the intelligence argument right out of the window.

When a philosophy allows such warped arguments to be made plausibly, the philosophy itself is warped. The exclusivity of man was asserted in the founding document of the West (Gen 1: 27, to quote chapter and verse), and it’s only by tossing this document aside that all sorts of degenerate variants of marriage become possible.

But this document has indeed been tossed aside, and insisting on it as the basis of our civilisation seems rather churlish. So fine, we are nothing but apes, and where does it say that apes can’t marry cats?

Thus I hope you’ll join me in wishing Karl and Choupette every happiness in the world. Incidentally, does anyone know the cat for ‘I do’?

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