Not mine, thank the Lord, but some poor wretch my keeper has picked up.

He was crying on the phone to a friend this morning and the house has a strange smell which had us trio of pets all twitching our noses in uncertainty about its origin and nature.

Keeper was sobbing away on the blower describing his trip out to Hampstead yeaterday and as he was driving along some narrow, parked car-lined road by the Royal Free hospital witnessed the car in front of him roll over a black cat that sprinted out into the road from under one of the parked up cars.

He stopped and walked back to retrieve the unlucky creature, to find it dead on the spot. It was a scraggly old male with no collar -a virtual stray. Perhaps his life was so rough he had decided to end it all in a cat suicide.

Now my keeper is a strange sort with some funny ideas sometimes. He related how he had picked up the dead cat and put it in a Tesco carry bag, brought it home and wrapped the little body in three layers of black plastic bin liner secured round with sellotape to try to keep out the stench of rotting cat.

He put the cat mummy on a makeshift altar in a little room up in the attic that he uses as a store. There he has installed some incense and candles and a picture of baby Jesus above.

I know this because I followed him upstairs as he carried the dark package on outstretched hands as if in some funeral ceremony, slowly, deliberately, into the room.

I peered up, unblinkingly, from the top of the staircase as he placed the black shiny package on the improvised wooden shelf altar and started chanting on some rosary beads. . . "Oh dear Lord, please take care of this little soul, who no one cared about in life and deliver him to peace and rest. In your holy name, Amen"

Well I was flabaghasted by this display of strange animal religous rights and for a second thought my keeper had lost the plot. But as my eyes settled on the little black form on the wooden shelf-come altar, my psychic DNA-doctored mind tripped in and I saw a little blue light hovering over the wrapped body. It was the dear soul of my little dead brother. And I sensed he was happy.

My keeper went on to relate on the phone about how they do say the soul -animal or human- lingers around his/her dead body for up to three days after death before going on to heaven. During that time prayer helps the departed one, as do positive thoughts about them, he said. I would have thought he'd been staying up too late eating chocolate cookies with his Buddhist books had I not seen that floating dot of electra blue.

But I shouldn't really criticize my good keeper, for it was his compassion and decency and daring that got tiny kitty me rescued from my cage of hell in that horrible experiment lab' and away from those sadistic sub-human scientists.

Yours
CATHEAD