Shakespeare

In the twenty-first century there is a second-hand book store in Newtown. I consider Wayne Chapman’s Books on King a welcome refuge from the dead-spaces of UTS. There is a misplaced belief among some new-media-technocrats that the ink-based medium is redundant in the paperless society. This appears not to be the case as books will always have an important place be it electronic versions on cyberspace, or text sent through mobile phones. There will however always be the compulsion for hard-core readers to acquire a hard-copy of text. I am a collector of stories because I was born to be the master story-teller of the techno-age-of-infinity in this the millennium of Ra.

I remember my mother telling me towards the end of the twentieth century about an Original Egyptian Temple Cat. To best describe Shakespeare would be to say that this is a ginger/white cat with Egyptian markings and the sign of infinity on his forehead. He used to sleep curled up in the window in a cat-basket among the books on display. This cat is loved by most but not everyone can appreciate a religious icon which was once worshiped in the Temple of the Sun in Ancient Egypt. The breed of cat originated from Persia and was acquired by the high priests of Ra because of the image of the Sacred Scarab on the forehead of these cats. These temple cats were respected as being the representation of the Supreme Sun God Ra’s immortality.

The life-span of these Ra-cats of the Divine is normally seventeen years although my cat Garfield extended his life by additional six months. Regrettably Garfield was poisoned by someone who will one day be made accountable by the weighing of the feather. Today Shakespeare is cared for by Wayne who recognises the importance of respect for a cat who has been kidnapped and abandoned in a place too faraway. But luckily he has been micro-chipped otherwise he would have been disposed of and never heard of again. One evening Shakespeare was attacked by a possum whose claws ripped open a nasty gash across his neck. Thankfully, I had in my possession a tube of aloe vela which is an antiseptic which has been used in my late mother’s side of the family since the time of Alexander the Great.