Some cats!

Saturday 11:24 p.m.
You're lying drunk on this wonderful hammock in West Australia. You're lying there in the hammock and you tell yourself that this is not so lonesome, this being drunk on the Victoria Bitter and lying there in the hammock. There is the huge amount of Australian stars to look up to and it is a wonderfully constructed hammock from Mexico, kind of made of bits of spidery string. It catches you in mid-air, between two trees. But you try not to feel separate and lonesome lying there out in the back garden, or the yard, between the trees in the hammock.

Something glides under the small of your back and caresses you. Then it moves back again, and again, and again. As you are lying there falling asleep, or maybe passing out, you feel the wonderful massage on the small of your back, and you're not quite passed out yet, and you wonder if you have felt it at all. This happened quite a lot.

Sometimes I wondered if I was imagining it. The caressing was a puzzlement. Then once when I was not so drunk, but was in the hammock and the caressing began, I thought : This is not a shark passing underneath in a dream. This is really happening.

The cat was kind of feral and used to live in the hedge. After a while, and I did drink a lot of Victoria Bitter in West Australia, the cat would massage the small of my back and then jump up and sit on my belly as I looked up at the wonderful Australian stars. It was completion when I got the cat to do that. It was serenity. The cat was called George.

A hut with a cat flap! What a fortunate creature I would be then!