First, catch your cat

I wrote down the date on my scoresheet yesterday - 27 September 2004 - and thought there was something familiar about it, but just couldn't put my finger on it. It wasn't until hours later that I realised it was the fourth anniversary of my release - or escape - from the unit.

Talking of madness, I have devised a plan to convince the library, by stealth, that I have lost my mind. I already have quite a lot of pictures posted up around my desk at work. Famous paintings, mostly, and poems, but also cat photographs - Alfred, Guthrum and a kitten with a rifle. Now, having successfully located a Manx cat yesterday, I have another one. So I wonder. Suppose I photographed loads of cats, and put all their photos up around my desk. So many that they obscured my screen, that they ran loose on the table like inhabitants of a two-dimensional lost cats' home, so many that they started turning up in books. Word would spread about this lunatic at the medical campus library who was obsessed by cats, but everybody would be far too scared to ask me about it. They'd all start expecting a monomaniac moment like in The Shining when Shelley Duval discovers that Jack Nicholson's written nothing all winter except ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY over and over again. It'd be great.

Wasn't the reason why cranky old women got cats as their familiars that they wanted people to think of them as witches?