Who is Study Cat?

It’s come to this.

You’re more than halfway through your PhD and you’ve hit a wall. You sit in front of your computer with stacks of books and piles of journal papers on either side, sticky notes of every colour scattered across every surface and up the walls, and, in-between it all, small notebooks full of scribbled notes, many of which you can’t even remember making (were you asleep? Were you drunk? Was it someone else with your handwriting? Are you losing your mind?)

But just when you think all hope is lost and that you’ll never have another coherent thought or actually string more than two sentences together at a time, help arrives.

Study Cat.

Springing on to your desk when you least expect it, tail draped across your keyboard, or fluffy buttocks placed carefully over the paragraph you were just trying to read, there she is. Now there is no excuse not to stop.

Study cat’s real name is Elsie. She’s a British Shorthair living in a village by a lake in Switzerland, with her Australian family: Kate (the PhD student), Malcolm, and Thilda.