As his carpark territory is 50km away from where I live I can only visit once a week. So, a week later I returned and there he was. It was an extra hot day, so he was taking in the shade under one of the cars in his carpark, paws in the sun, which is customary with under-cars-on-sunny-days cats. He was not as purry and friendly this time, perhaps because he knew I was now his servant, not a friend to be made. I told him to follow me to a safer place. He did. And there I put down a fistful of niblets for him, which he ate hungrily, cracking some and just sucking up others. But he proved to me that his teeth were OK! His tail was up. He was not exactly grateful: he took this tribute as his due.

As is usually the case, all I know of a wild cat is by observation. I knew someone fed him, but not how often. I did not know if he had a house to go to or was fully wild. But on this day I was lucky. While I was taking the supermarket wild cat's photo, an old lady came up in her car. She was caring for him.

Usually old cat ladies are suspicious of me and my camera and think I am the police, but not this one. She fed the puss a pan of mash which he gobbled up quickly while she answered my questions. I learned that the cat had 'always' been in the supermarket carpark; that there were others who came there but that he never left it and was always to be found in the same spot there; that he therefore had no house to go to and was fully wild; that he had no name.

So I called him Mungo Carpark, after the African explorer who went to the same school as I did, though 200 years earlier. It seemed to fit him, living in a public, much frequented, but also remote place. I called him by his new name. Odd to live a long life before finding a name.

The old lady closed her carboot full of her weekly shop and drove away. Mungo and I remained alone, looking at each other in the blazing sunshine. Then he gimpily took steps to his favourite spot and lay down under the car that now was parked there, paws again in the sun. I asked him what he did when all the cars were gone in the evenings. He licked his face and said nothing. But you have lived a long life here, I said. He blinked his yellow eyes. I said I would come back with more niblets. He blinked again and gave me permission to leave.