Published by Billy Mann
I'm originally from Liverpool and worked as a national magazine journalist for more than 30 years before suffering a stroke at age 53. I started blogging as part of a neuro-rehabilitation programme and wrote the very first entries with one finger of my disabled left hand. Later, art became another therapy for me at Headway East London's Submit To Love Studios. I write about my daily activities and encounters. In 1988, I married Jane. We are still together today, sharing our lives and making each other laugh.
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Billy's Scrapbook 
Happy New Year Billy. Is one possible? Glad to have found your page in 2020.
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Thank you Isobel. Tune in next week to read how my dislike of cats became a thing of the past. Happy 2021.
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Did you meet MasterB?
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No, it was an encounter with TS Elliott that did it.
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Which of the Jellicoe cats?
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The Old Possum series is featured in two parts on the BBC Sounds app (Poetry Extra). I don’t have a favourite yet, but was enchanted enough by the readings to surrender my prejudice. I later found another reading (The Naming of Cats) by Maxine Peake, who owns the world’s most delicious voice.
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Do try Christopher Smart’s My Cat Jeoffrey, and then Wendy Cope’s My Lover
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They both pushed me back to believing cats to be the most selfish and self-centred of the living species. I’m sticking with TS Elliott.
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Really? I love My cat Jeoffrey, and Wendy Cope’s isn’t about a cat! I think human beings are the most self-centred and selfish.
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Sorry, Isobel. I’ve obviously missed something (it wouldn’t be the first time). I took the latter to be a satirical pastiche of the former. One elevates cats to the position of deity, the other equates them (via metaphor) with bad lovers.
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Wendy Cope has just used the structure of Smart’s poem for her own about her human lover. Smart was confined to a mental asylum for some time. Somewhere I read, but it may be untrue, that he had a cat companion while he was there. My Cat Jeoffrey is part of a longer piece Jubilate Agno, a Christian poem so he is describing how Jeoffrey worships the Almighty in his way, it’s not about raising the cat to a godlike position.
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Thank you. My mistake.
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