If someone had stopped Pope Gregory IX persecuting cats the plague may never have happened with all those rampaging ‘cat’s away, mice will play’ flea-infested rats.
Now, that’s my kind of cat-propaganda Netflix doc fact! But later, shooting my mouth off about it on a beach sunbed, the sunbathing papist friend next to me shoots back and googles what I’ve just casually summer day-out said.
And Vox in Rama! I’m wrong! Shot down in flames! Pope Greg’s papal bull simply cites satanic cults and black cats as devilish symbolic allegories but never an order to kill or make my furry goodies game! Enough to make me black death sneeze!
But what kills me off, and not cats, gets even closer to home. In order to keep parchment-gnawing mice in line Exeter Cathedral back then had cat flaps to let mousers freely roam and even documented the maintenance costs of these saintly felines.
So, Netflix came up with a load of papal bull! Or google searches wrap flocks in cotton wool! The only way to really know is to read up on it through authoritative literature. The easiest thing though will be to just carry on with my poetic license, claiming (with a purr):
If someone had stopped Pope Gregory IX persecuting cats the plague may never have happened with all those rampaging ‘cat’s away, mice will play’ flea-infested rats.
John Di Girolamo was born during the swinging middle ages as the Battle of Hastings raged outside on a cold, miserable Saturday evening just outside 'The Juggler's Arms' in Oxford, Torquay and Exeter at the same time. Born to a family, he spent most of his early years learning how to open umbrellas for a rainy day, and the runnings of horses and sword swallowers and the costs they incurred. Having graduated in 'Circus Management', he took to spinning plates for a living and persuaded his father to buy a restaurant to fund what he believed would be a lucrative career move. However, in the the days leading to The Age of Post Punk', he quit and would embark upon what was to go down in history doodles as a notebook.
Few knew it then but he had already started copying poetry, and often written by other people. As the minutes passed by, and Sardinia loomed, the idea of collages and drawings suddenly hit him as a way of filling up what had become a kind of book with pages and all. One day while storming off in a huff because his mum told him to, he struck upon the idea of putting it all together over a long-playing record (later a CD) and during a commercial break in the digital age, decided a blog would end Cromwell's ill-fated republic.
Sent off by recorded post, it would be by chance that his poems would get to their ultimate destination as, meanwhile, his pigeon who had queued so loyally for so long, sadly died the day before it was sacked.
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A Pretty Kettle of Poetry 
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