What’s clear at least is that sometime late in November (?) the practical experiments of Curtis Thumb and his Grandson Andrew did start indeed, with the consequence now so well-known to us all. On one cold October day (sic), Andrew must have somehow kicked off a decade of insolent lethargy and instead got inspired to start up the work. His inspirations were obvious and his early research was what he drunkenly called ‘directly plagiaristical.’ The tragic-comic monologue to camera recorded on Tape 72(a) demonstrates that Andy had heard from Curtis of the classical olde Experimente by Schrödinger wherein that gentleman’s unfortunate Cat was sealed in a box with a quantity of decaying uranium atoms. Indeed from what Andy says that experiment was obvs a powerful inspiration to him, a youth who was anyhow already on record for pointless cruelty involving dogs, pigeons, a ferret and other of God’s creatures.

According to the neighbours, their cats and numerous strays of that area began to go missing at around this time. Andrew reasoned (in so far as he could do so) that he could not get that actual Schrödinger’s Cat because he didn’t (1) know who that Schrödinger was or (2) know where to find his cat and to be more precise he had never seen that Schrödinger – not down the pub or on the bench outside Cost Cutter or anywhere most of his granddad Curtis’s old timer generation gathered in the drizzle and the fading fading afternoons of their lives. But Andrew also reasoned that ‘what the fuck’ he didn’t really need that actual cat, a cat was a cat in his bag, and pretty soon and with some cunning he collected some of them in that bag – a sports bag with words and slogans of the day like Jump For It or Severed Wars or Nothing Possible written up all over it. Later, back in the cellar of the house, he made a wooden box using his carpentry skills and a hammer. The box had a hole in the top of it where he could fit his air rifle in there and fire it into the void. Taken together this was quite a device and tho maybe not as lethal as the original one – constructed by Schrödinger and involving uranium atoms in state of randomised decay – Andrew knew from experience that if he fired that rifle three times into the box there was pretty well a fifty-fifty chance of any cats inside there coming out alive.

Days passed. The neighbours soon reported gunshots at different hours of day and night, pestering the cops with their petty complaints. Curtis in the garden. Andrew sat on the wall looking drunk and exhausted. The cops saying, “Look lads, try to keep the racket down a bit, there are people to consider, kids and the like . . .” But the two of them paid no heed of cause and experiments continued.

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