Nothing funny about cats!

The Scotch poet Lachlan MacKinnon has written in to warn us that T. S. Eliot the transatlantic had no sense of humour. "Eliot's behaviour, involving carelessness amounting to cruelty, is hard to understand," he says. "The ultimately sadistic nature of the inveterate practical joker, which Eliot was, has something to do with it, as does the lack of a genuine sense of comedy. Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939) is, after all, as unfunny as comic verse gets." Indeed so, and it would not surprise me to learn that not a single person has ever laughed at that "comical" book!