Felicity

If you learn anything in your life, you will find yourself roughly
where I am now. Lying in a pile of drunk cats.

I have fifteen cats in all, named after various notable poets:
H?lderlin, Rilke, Celan, Cohen, Layton, Rimbaud, Evans, Shelley,
Hughes, Maxwell, Alfau, Eliot, Mandelshtam, Lawrence and Dunthorne. I
have trained them by writing and speaking continuously in service of
the ultimate, and of mankind. Whenever one of my articles was printed
in the Sunday papers, I forced my cats to read and reread it, and
whenever I was interviewed on the radio, I turned the volume up, so
that all fifteen of them could hear what I was saying. I taught them to
smoke - cigarettes at first, but then pipes. Their favourite tobacco is
Gambler Full Flavour. We order from rollyourown.com.

In return for my teaching, they do all the household jobs for me -
sweeping the rug, feeding the fish, changing the channel. The works.
And when I need to be taken somewhere, my cats use their combined
strength to carry me horizontally out of the front door (it is Rimbaud
's duty to make sure the door is then locked,) and down the street.
Sometimes I will want to call in at the paper shop, if there's an
article of mine in the Sunday papers, but mostly it's straight to
Alfredo's for a cut. Alfredo's assistant finds it difficult to put the
robe around me while I am horizontal, so my cats take care of it for
him, before climbing on each other's backs skilfully, so as to prop me
up and put me into the chair. Maxwell and Eliot then scamper off
immediately to buy Alfredo a fresh ciabatta (a token of my gratitude)
while the rest take up position on various street corners to eavesdrop
on my fellow villagers. They're under strict instructions to report any
notable goings-on to me. For the cleverer cats - Celan, Cohen and
Layton - this is no problem at all, but most of them have to rely on
discrete use of dictaphones and notebooks. This has resulted in several
brushes with the law, and I once had to send a team of seven cats to
bust Dunthorne out of jail.

Though I am sometimes strict with them, I do appreciate my cats very
dearly, and so I won't hear of it when they refuse my offer of a round,
on the many occasions I decide to go out for the evening. They're into
cocktails - green dragon being a firm favourite. When it's time to go
home, most of them are too tipsy to carry me properly, so they end up
domino'ing down and dropping me, and I wind up where I am now. Lying in
a pile of drunk cats.