I, Demented Kitten?

In his comment to the post below, Javé de Lasse points me in the direction of the ‘demented kitten’ chapter of his torpid novel Declining Bore, wherein I may discover the previously undiscovered fictionalised portrait of myself.

Here follows a quick precis of what occurs in this chapter (no.8 for those who are interested): James (the hero) and Mary Potter (i.e. Peggy Grounter) rescue a kitten from the hands of a dirty gypsy. Like a lot of things in the novel, it is never made clear why they do this, but that’s just how it goes. In any case, the kitten soon lives up to its tag – and runs riot around the office, weeing on proof copies, vomiting in the photocopier, dragging in a family of half-dead ducklings (from where? again, it isn’t clear), biting a famous writer’s hand and (I quote) ‘mewing gutturally’. They plan to kick the kitten out, but it decides to leave of its own accord, not before depositing a small pile of poo on James’ perversely tidy desk.

I’ll be straight about this: I shared office space with de Lasse and Grounter for a few years and – though I may, at times, have been an enthusiastic colleague – I never once excreted any sort of substance on a book/desk, or mauled a duckling, or bit a writer on the hand. And though I struggle to imagine what a ‘guttural mew’ is, I’m almost certain it isn’t something I’m in the habit of producing.

As for vomiting in the photocopier, I was very ill at the time (and I resent the use of ‘in’ – it was rather more ‘on’).