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?