When my wife and I bought our first place - a converted top floor flat in north London - it was at a time when property prices were at a peak and interest rates were around 13.5%. We were both working for Reuters at the time and found a mortgage fairly easily but by the time we moved in, we had spare cash for a bed and little else.

On a Saturday morning shortly after we moved in, we took a walk around the area and found a small art gallery on the main road. In the window was a framed print called ‘Fighting Cats’ by Michelle Tippett. Our new flat was bright and the living area had a small mezzanine, which meant there was one side of the room with a large white wall. This picture, with its black wooden frame, looked perfect for hanging in the middle of that space. Both of us immediately felt drawn to the picture but the price!

Reason told us that to buy it was sheer extravagance, that there were other, much more important purchases to be made if our new home was going to function as more than a large waiting room with clothes on the floor. Reason told us that friends and family would consider us not only reckless but also ungrateful for the help and advice we had been given over the previous weeks if we bought a print ahead of a sofa or even some pots and pans.

Reason lost out, of course, and those Fighting Cats were the only thing we took with us from that flat when we got posted to Singapore less than a year later. The print now hangs in its fourth house. No sofa and no pots and pans remain from that Highgate flat.

Every time I enter our house, it’s Fighting Cats that I see first. It hangs in the hall like a welcome memory. Sometimes, reason can stop you making the right choice. Buying that print led to a couple of uncomfortable months but it was our first risky decision taken as a couple and it gave us the taste for more: moving to Singapore, having three children, leaving full-time employment and setting up our own - separate - businesses. And we’re bound more by those cats than would have been possible with any set of quality kitchen tools.

If you meet your own Fighting Cats, don’t turn your back.

Tags: fighting cats, Michelle Tippett