A Plan to Escape is Devised

Today saw our weekly outing to Dundee's Mid Craigie Cattery. These trips are ostensibly intended to lift us from our torpor and provide contact with the outside world as part of the asylum's social integration program. In reality, the only human being we see on these visits is the Cattery owner, a po-faced woman named Imogen Pottle who makes no effort to disguise her obvious contempt for us. She is the dowdy, cardiganned mistress of our thick-wristed male nurse, Pugg Muckle, and together they exploit our vulnerable, voiceless position in society by using us as free labour. She only tolerates our presence because Muckle forces us, under the threat of a sound thrashing with a length of birch, to muck out the cats' wire cages with our bare hands. It is humiliating work for a man of my standing.

As we scrabble around their accumulated feculence and the heaped corpses of their departed brethren, the cats themselves are half-crazed with hunger and terror, so tear at our flesh with their unclipped claws and screech wretchedly. Further to this, Imogen Pottle openly flouts the recent ban on smoking in enclosed places by smoking in this enclosed place.

At 3pm sharp, her and the male nurse Muckle leave us unattended and retreat to the back room to noisily relieve their base urges. At 3:04pm they return, their lustful appetites evidently satiated. I have decided that during next week's visit to Mid Craigie Cattery, I will risk all by using this brief window of opportunity to make my escape. It is a risky strategem but, as no other plan presents itself, it is my only chance.