It's tricky launching into an amusing anecdote with the phrase "The day my partner's grandfather died," because it puts people in a serious frame of mind. The phrase "My partner's a transsexual" isn't much better, because it tends to distract people from whatever you say next. So it's difficult to know where to start.

It's probably simplest to begin in the Blue Cross Animal Shelter. My partner Jamie had just bought his first house and wanted a cat to complete it. We wandered along the corridor reading descriptions which sounded unnervingly like gay singles ads. "I'm Jasmine, I'm homeloving and shy and will be very loyal to someone I can trust." "Two playful ginger boys looking for a fun place to stay." The cat who drew our attention the most was Sammy. Sammy's a handsome black semi-long-haired cat and the living image of my long dead Flash. We could open the doors of the pens and try our luck with the cats (..."This is Dusty. Dusty's had bad times in the past and she will scratch when she's startled"...). Sammy was friendly - up to a point. At the point where he wanted us to stop petting him he neatly and gently grabbed Jamie's forefinger in his front teeth. A cat with a strong sense of boundaries. A cat one could respect. And Jamie liked him too, which was not a bad thing since Sammy seemed to have decided that he was going to be Jamie's cat.

We asked the kennel maid about him.

"I'll just get her out for you," she said.

"Um... her?" we queried. "It says 'he' on his label."

"Ah," she said.

"Yes," she said.

"She's an hermaphrodite," she said.

An hermaphrodite cat? How cool is that? Jamie passes very well these days so it wasn't obvious just how appropriate the pairing of Jamie and Sammy actually is, or why we really were not bothered by the discussion with the Pet Behaviourist, or the explanation of what had happened when Sammy had gone to the vet's.

Now the odds of a post-op transsexual finding an hermaphrodite cat in an animal shelter are... well... let's just say there's not much point Jamie backing outsiders for a while. But the odds get odder than that.

Jamie had a new house and a new cat, and I had a new house but I had not yet got myself my cat. I looked at the websites for the local animal shelters but none of the animals appealed, so I mentioned at work that I was looking for a cat and the grape-vine reported that a colleague of a colleague had taken in a couple of cats which needed rehoming. These were a young pair, siblings, who'd been left to fend for themselves when someone down the street had moved out. A couple of emails and phone calls later, and I was talking to Cath on the phone. She told me more about the cats and I arranged to go round to hers, meet her partner Sally and see the cats. Lesbians with too many cats. When I told Jamie, who'd been a lesbian himself of course, he said "well that figures".

So round I went and spent a couple of hours playing with Tinker and the Captain and chatting with Sally and Cath. (Tinker's a tabby, the Captain's ginger and white, since you ask). Sally is a bit of an earth mother. Very intelligent; someone who can talk and think at the same time and rarely stops talking. Cath by contrast has an ability to "vanish into the foreground" as Pratchett puts it. I knew what he meant but I hadn't seen it before. My gaydar is crap, but my transdar is pretty good, and I looked at Cath and listened to Sally and thought about Cath and said to myself "lesbians, eh?" Especially when it became clear that Sally's previous partners had been men. But you don't just say "actually, my partner's a transsexual" to people you've just met, even if they are lesbians.

I'd forgotten that Cath was the colleague of colleagues so I was chattering away about my new house and my new garden and my new cats to my boss the next day when I remembered and said "I'm getting them from someone who works in Finance, actually. It's Cath." "So that's what Gavin's calling himself these days is it?" said my boss. Pretty good transdar, indeed. I felt slightly smug and slightly guilty because Cath has no option but to be out at work since she had transitioned there, but Jamie's stealth, so no-one at my work knows about that particular source of gossip about him and me.

Now - what are the odds of one pair of cats moving from one stealth trans couple to another stealth trans couple via connections made in the straight community? Mind you, Tinker and the Captain have no kind of gender ambiguities which makes them the odd creatures out in this story. But even so, what is it with me, transsexuals and cats? Maybe I should start backing outsiders.

There is one final smug-making thing for Jamie which brings us back to the beginning of the story and the day his grandfather died. I'd arranged to pick up the Captain and Tinker on the Friday evening but my plans were obviously overthrown by the old gentleman's death. He died peacefully. It was expected. He'd had a long and happy life. But it was still a curve-ball which completely threw Jamie. I told him I'd drive down and spend the weekend with him, and rang Sally in the morning to explain that I could not come round to pick up the cats that evening.

The grandparent-grandchild relationship is an odd one. Some grandparents never know their own grandchildren while others raise them as their own so it is impossible to generalise. Sally however had decided that Jamie was over-reacting to his grandfather's death, and I was over-reacting to Jamie's grief, and she was ready to let the cats go, and really I should have come round and collected them. I am being unkind about her, but she was unkind about Jamie. She was polite enough about it but her priority was the cats, and she was just the teensiest bit patronising: "Be careful," she said. "Men are used to getting women to be supportive - it's how they are raised." I was at my desk at work, and couldn't really reply to that one.

"Oh Sally," I thought. "If only you knew...."