Let us begin by establishing that Marie-chan is the cutest cat ever. There is no escaping it. A little white ball of fluff with a face that suggests that she thinks she is much bigger and more fierce than she actually is, when you see her you want to look in back to find out if there is a key where you can wind her up.
A close friend of mine — we’ve never met nor heard each other’s voices, but hey, this is the twenty-first century — is devoted to cats. She has spent hundreds and hundreds of hours over the last seven years seeking the availability of a drug that would save millions of her feline friends from painful almost-certain death. We’ll talk more about that in a bit.