OH, HOW I long for the old days, when everything was simple.

When the TV had three channels, shops closed on a Sunday and cat food was simply cat food.

I’m not a child of the 21st century and I never will be. I’ve tried, I really have, but I can’t do it, I really can’t.

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I wish I’d been born sooner. I don’t mean something BC or anything like that. I don’t want to be a cave dweller – my husband couldn’t be relied upon to go out and hunt and kill a woolly mammoth for our tea – but I’d like to go back a few decades, to a time when things weren’t quite so complicated and stressful and when everything didn’t require decision making on a grand scale.

I’ve thought this for a long time, but it really hit home in, of all places, Pets at Home.

I’d gone in for some cat food, a packet of crunchies to keep our two pets happy. Yet when I found the appropriate section I was faced with so dozens of bags, each one addressing different feline characteristics.

Indoor cats, outdoor cats, long haired cats, short haired cats, old cats, young cats, cats with sensitive stomachs and cats with weight problems.

There’s breed-specific cat food for various types of cat, and at one point I thought I’d made a mistake and gone to Boots instead: there was a pack of food for “intense beauty”, presumably for the Nicole Scherzingers of the cat world, and food for felines with sensitive skin.

There was the equivalent of the supermarket premium ranges, with food for “seriously fine dining”, and, amusingly, food for “fussy cats”, which begs the question , what if they are so fussy they don’t like it?

There’s a last resort if that happens – food for “difficult cats”, which I assume contains the cat form of Prozak.

And so it goes on. It took me half-an-hour to find a big standard pack for a bog standard cat, without physical or behavioural quirks. When I was a child, there was Whiskas and Felix, maybe even Go Cat, but that was it. There was no food for moody cats or cats with one ear or cats with green eyes.

I’m all for choice, but you can have too much. From food to clothing, to insurance – last week it took me more than half a day to trawl through all the comparison sites for home insurance.

I saved money, but collapsed from exhaustion afterwards .

There is so much it’s a wonder our brains don’t explode. We have survived for thousands of years with less (and so have cats for that matter). Do we really need it? I think not.