Puss is on the sick and popping pills

Anyway, the attention-seeking little fiend has contrived to develop a lower urinary tract infection. She arches over the litter-tray with a look of serene expectation, stands there for a little while, looks down disappointedly, paws at the litter, ambles off. Ten minutes later, she repeats the performance with a mounting expression of feline consternation. I remember this routine, and it has its sequel not in the litter-tray but on my duvet.

I take the cat to the vet. She examines the cat.

"Your cat has an umbilical hernia," she says.

"Compliments of the season to you," I say. We don't need to do anything about the hernia, apparently. The vet was just raising it to make small talk.

The vet injects the cat in the scruff of its neck with an anti-inflammatory and an antibiotic, gives me some pink pills, empties my wallet and hustles me onto the street. I take the cat home.

I am not long back from the vet when I get a call from my little sister, Peta.

"Hey!" says Peta. Actually, though, she says it without the exclamation mark. She says: "Hey." There's a pause. "I've been made redundant, too."

"What are the chances of that?" say I, to which she has no answer.

"Well, there is a recession on, you know," I say, which makes her no more jolly.

Peta started working a year ago in a recruitment consultancy. Hers is what you might call a meta-redundancy. In a boom time, headhunters spend their days moving candidates in a lucrative merry-go-round between one job and another. You might think that, in a bust, their services would be all the more urgently in demand - but it doesn't work out like that. "Thousands of candidates" into "no jobs" will not go. So now she's a candidate.

"Bummer," I say.

Later my brother Alex, with whom I share my Brixton flat, telephones.

"Have you heard about Peta?" he says.

"Yes," I say. "The cat's on the sick, too."

"I'm on my way home," he says. "Check me out. I'm the only one of four Leith siblings with a job. Losers!"

I end my phone call to Alex and spend three-quarters of an hour with the cat gripped under my arm, trying to make it eat a pink pill.

At five o'clock the following morning, the cat throws up volcanically all over Alex's bed while Alex is asleep in it. Alex suspects that the cat has been looking at fashion magazines and is now bulimic. I know better. And I have 22 pink pills left.