Riding out with Mac & Matteo

Warm shoulder — Cycling around London with his cat on his shoulder, balaclava-donning youth worker Mac is challenging society’s perceptions of people who look and dress like him. Molly Lipson chats to him about trauma, fatherhood and using his platform as a feline influencer for good.

If your algorithm ever feeds you cat content, you’ll likely have already come across Mac and Matteo. If you haven’t, you’ll probably want to. Matteo, a small black cat, rides around on Mac’s shoulders (Mac is an adult man) as the pair cycle around London. Sometimes, Matteo wears a puffer jacket, sometimes a beret; once he donned a farmer’s outfit, which combined a tweed flat cap and a blue gilet with his signature silver chain. He is stylish, adorable, and completely unphased by his new status as one of the internet’s most famous felines. 

In November 2025, Mac posted his first video with Matteo. In the four months since, they’ve amassed a following of nearly 200k on Instagram. Though Matteo might don a vast array of outfits in any given week, Mac sticks to just one – all black with a balaclava, only his eyes visible. He’s not necessarily trying to be mysterious, but he’s careful about revealing too much of his identity. He previously ran a community organisation [he asked us not to directly name it for privacy reasons] that supported young people in staying away from violence and gangs. Having been in a gang himself, Mac dedicated himself to intervening in the cycle that so many people he knew got caught up in. 

He spent over 10 years running his youth organisation. He loved the work he did and was a mentor to so many people – younger and older generations alike – but it started to wear him down. “It played on my mental health,” he says, welling up as he recounts it. “I felt if I continued it would just drive me nuts. People would confide in me about a lot of things, some things that you don’t even really want to be confided in about, and I’m an empath, so I carry people's pains. But at the same time, I’m a community leader, and I’m known for uplifting people. Online, I had to be upbeat – I’ve got a smile, everyone knows me to be quirky, joking. But when I’ve just come off the phone to a mother whose son’s been stabbed and I’m crying with her, then I have to do a branded post at 5pm… Well this mum follows my Instagram, she’s just been on the phone with me, and then I have to do this and she’ll see it.”

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He struggled to square the disparity between real life and social media, while he had also become someone many people confided in – a sort of sponge for trauma. “All the messages I got were somebody getting stabbed, somebody’s son’s dead, somebody’s brother’s dead, somebody’s sister’s dead, and then I’d go to an event or something and people would come up to me and say: ‘Hey Mac, love what you do. My sister’s son, he was stabbed.’ I just wanted to not hear about something negative for, like, 24 hours, please.” 

Mac knows over 50 people who have died, many of them youngsters. “I understood my role, and I understood that’s what I was here to do, but I knew that I couldn’t do this for much longer.” Eventually, he stepped back and went dark. When Mac re-emerged, Matteo on his shoulder, he chose not to share so much of himself with the world. Mac still supports young people, but he doesn’t post about it on social media and he doesn’t work with brands any more – unless they’re cat brands. Cat brands are his new thing. 

Another part of the reason Mac is careful about his identity is because of his five-year-old daughter. “I don’t want to talk about her too much, but she’s my life. I’m a full time dad. I do everything: wash clothes, cook breakfast, lunch, dinner, pick her up from school, homework.” He would get recognised a lot on the street, people stopping to chat to him, and he didn’t want that when he was out with his daughter. However, it was also his daughter who led to Matteo’s fame. “If it wasn't for her, I wouldn’t even have kept Matteo. I was going to give him away but my daughter literally cried, and I kept him because of that. She loves him and he loves her. All the cats love my daughter. I think half of the reason why my cats are so placid is because of the relationship they have with her,” Mac says. 

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Matteo is one of Mac’s eight cats – the day we speak he’s just adopted his eighth. “I’m going to stop at 10 because my dad had 10,” he says. “I had my differences with my dad, but one thing I have to thank him for is my love of cats.” The rest of the pack includes a collection of other black cats including Matteo’s mum, Queen C, another shoulder-trained cat called Aura, twins Base and Puma, plus two Sphynx cats Bluu Genesis and Pink Floyd, and the latest addition, a fluffy grey kitten called BamBam. But Matteo is undoubtedly the star of the show. He wanders around London unleashed, always at Mac’s side whether on the street, the tube or along the wall of the fountain at Trafalgar Square, from which he leaps effortlessly and elegantly right onto Mac’s shoulder. 

Matteo’s name came from a character in a film Mac watched on Netflix – he doesn’t even recall which one. Later, his sister told him that Matteo means ‘gift from God’ from its Italian-Hebrew origins. It was a perfect fit. “So here we are. I’m able to create smiles, I’m able to uplift people’s days, bring joy to people’s days without even having to even see them. I can touch a lot of people through my Insta,” he says. Matteo is also a great support to Mac himself. “He calms me down, he keeps me happy. He keeps bad energy away from me. I don’t see negative faces when he’s on my shoulder. Even if they were unhappy, when they see Matteo they start smiling.” 

Mac is acutely aware of the way people might perceive him as a Black, balaclava-clad man riding a bike through London, and often adapts his demeanour to make others feel more comfortable. Sometimes, if he realises he’s cycling up behind someone who hasn’t noticed that he’s there, he’ll start singing loudly to draw attention to himself as a non-threat. When they turn and see Matteo, rather than fear, their expression becomes one of surprise, and often joy.   

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“He calms me down, he keeps me happy. He keeps bad energy away from me. I don’t see negative faces when he’s on my shoulder.”

“I’ve been in Sloane Square, Hyde Park – all the places where people walk around with Rolexes on, and I will watch my body language. If I see a elderly woman or someone I think would be scared of my image, I’ll cross the road,” he says. Sometimes, he is shocked by people’s responses. “Even when I cross the road, people come following me,” he explains. Matteo seems to have the ability to fracture stereotypes in one fell swoop. Mac was fascinated by this, wondering where their fear had gone. Other times, the fear was his, especially when he had taken great pains to avoid making a woman walking on her own feel threatened in any way only to find her walking directly towards him. “Sometimes I just want to say, lady, don’t do that. Don’t trust no one!” 

Mac’s hyper-awareness speaks to the deep-rooted racist tropes that pervade British society. And yet, he doesn’t seem to hold any resentment or anger on this front; but nor is he blasé or dismissive about it. Instead, he is balanced and level-headed, his deeply empathetic nature commanding his position. “I am fully aware that people have had some terrible experiences, but I also want to desensitise the bally [balaclava]. I understand totally if somebody is withdrawn from my appearance. I do try to be as kind and as comfortable as I can. Sometimes in a situation, I’ll pull my mask up and show my face, often with children or elderly women, even if they don’t ask me to. I know that if they’ve come up to me already, it took something for them to do that, so let me help you.”

It’s an unfortunate reflection on society, though, that it takes the presence of a cat to let people’s guards down. On the internet, where social media is so swamped with hatred and abuse, perhaps the one thing that consistently unifies people are cute cat videos. In riding around London with Matteo, he has inadvertently forced people to rethink their prejudices, stumbling on a formula that breaches the gap between the internet and life out in the world, and a way to defy racialised tropes.

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Mac recounts one particularly moving interaction he had with a woman who messaged him from South Africa. She was an older, white woman who was robbed in 2018 by masked men. She told Mac that any time she saw a balaclava it triggered her PTSD, she would get nervous and start shaking. “She said that I’m the first person [she’s seen in a balaclava] that’s able to bring her comfort and ease her mind, and that I've helped her in other ways that I don't understand. That message, that one message alone, was why I continued it.”

There’s another side to Mac, though, and it’s one you don’t want to cross. “I love people generally, but there’s some people that I don’t like or tolerate in this world. I don’t like bullies, I don’t like people going against gay people, I don’t like racist people. You’ll see a whole different side to me if you’re oppressing young people and preventing their life from going in a good direction, and you’re one of the main reasons why they are scared to dream, to live their life, to leave the area,” he says. 

His approach with these kinds of people, he explains, is to try and reason with them, one-on-one. He doesn’t bring back up, he doesn’t use threats, he just tries to appeal to people’s hearts. “The guys that I don't like, the drug dealers – you've got one chance with me.” he continues. “I’ll meet you, I’ll talk to you off camera, and I’ll give you a chance to think. When I come back around and spin the block again, if I see you handing drugs to people, then you will get the old me. And that’s not pretty. I don’t strut my stuff like I’m strong. All I know is, you could stab me, you could kill me, but I am coming at you with my heart, and that’s different. I’ve got something to live for and I’ve got something to do, and through that I think people see my determination and that I’m not playing.” 

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“You’ll see a whole different side to me if you’re oppressing young people and preventing their life from going in a good direction, and you’re one of the main reasons why they are scared to dream.”

The duo’s newfound fame has opened up some very exciting opportunities. Matteo has starred in a cat chain giveaway campaign, trialled cat food for sponsored posts and participated in an unboxing of a cat harness. Meanwhile, Mac is also building a new community scheme he’s calling One a Year. The idea is to support one person over the course of a year in every part of their life, whether that be helping them find housing, work or mental health support. In theory, this person is then in a better position to help others, and the cycle repeats. “More people will get genuine help from those who have been in that same situation as them,” Mac explains, “so even though it’s called One A Year, it’s really a lot more than that, and as it grows and develops we can hopefully support more people each year.” 

And on top of that, he wants to take young Black men, especially those living in the shadow of more oppressive structures – homophobia, close-mindedness, etc. – on fishing trips to Scotland. Matteo, of course, is the main attraction. “Catching it, killing it, eating it – him and me – I’ll teach them how to start a fire, these are all things I’ll be learning along the way myself. That’s the type of content I want to create, where I’m teaching you something that’s not in your everyday, from somebody who you wouldn’t expect to necessarily be doing it.” 

There are plans for children’s books, soft toys, a whole Peppa Pig-style kingdom to launch. But for Mac, all of that is secondary. The most important thing is bringing a smile to people’s faces. “People say all the time that they find joy in my page. I’m shocked that people watch three minutes of our videos. I’m just grateful, I didn’t know this was gonna happen. And yeah, I just love Matteo,” he concludes. 

Molly Lipson is a freelance journalist. Follow her on Instagram.

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