My Dear Clatterworthy, inspiration – wouldn’t you agree? – is a stick of dynamite up the buttocks, a jug of icy water in the face, the unexpected rainbow, a yellow sun on a freezing winter’s day. Latterly its song has been reduced to a whisper but then, blow me down like a bark in a Gower gale, didn’t I hear that my fellow versifier, T.S. Eliot, had written a whole book of poems on the subject of – cats.
Now there’s a tidy idea, thought I to myself: popularity, a seaful of sales, and no need to draw deeply from inspiration’s well. Easily done, you could say. And out there are surely more cat lovers, their caterwauling pets inhabiting smoothed and ironed bungalows or furry flats, than are readers of rhyme. Wouldn’t such folk drool over further pages on paws, or tales about tails in feline feminine rhymes?
My public – small as a church mouse, and as unrewarding as a church collection – could multiply, like Eliot’s, with lines of catty couplets. Already I hear the meows of gingers, the hisses of Toms, the spits of tortoise-shells, just beyond my mind’s window. And, hark, creativity purrs in my ear:
Oh pussy cat with that disgusting rat
Don’t drop the bloody thing on the mat.
As wooden as a Carmarthenshire ladling spoon? Yes, I know. But the smell of a contract for a publishing deal will revive the momentarily stilled creative breeze.
And here I anticipate the reply from the chief source of pecuniary benefits to the Thomas household, you, my esteemed agent. Cats have been done! you asseverate. Indeed so. But I can do dogs! Here in the Boat House Caitlin is minding a pair of mutts for a neighbour. Their chorus of dissonance, their communion of yap – why already doggerels are forming in my mind.
What about it then? My audience will be suburban dog-lovers, my words have more bristle than a fox hound pack’s whiskers, and more silk than the setter’s soft coat.
In truth the furry buggers that Caitlin cossets haven’t taken to me, nor I to them. They aren’t allowed in the shed where I write and where a sabbath silence is observed. They know I will bite them if they encroach. They also understand that on entering the house after a walk with Caitlin, I insist they wipe their feet. I am the big dog of the house. I often belch and fart when drink has been taken. They however must poo outside. I wish all dogs were neutered. I have taught this pair that the cheese on the table is mine but on the floor is theirs; and that when I am soused, and roar and snore in my sixty leagues below the sea deep sleep, their pooch presence on my ocean-stormed and becalmed bed is as unwelcome as a puritan in a Porthcawl pub. In truth I loathe dogs. But now their paths will be paved with poetry. Money, Clatterworthy, money!
DT
