Important warning

If you're thinking of getting a kitten (a fluffy, cute kitten to play with, oh such fun, and so cute, and won't it be adorable), I urge you to think again. You will enjoy it for a while. It will wrap its incredibly soft little paws around your hands and face; you won't be able to stop yourself falling in love; it will play with a bit of fluff or run after the reflection of your knife on the wall while you're eating and you will be sure that this delight will last forever. Only you won't realise that one day, thirteen years later (you can feel the doom even in that number), you will be cursing the day you thought it was a good idea to acquire said lovely cute kitten and his brother because now you're doing the washing in the laundry room you foolishly agreed to share with the cats after the move six years ago so you can't even leave any clean washing in there and you're wondering where the cat pee smell comes from, that smell you remember so well from the first cat-related disappointment when those little kittens scratched your brand new turquoise leather sofa until it was torn and looked about twenty years old and then proceeded to pee on the stuffing through the slashes in the leather so that for ten years you would have to live with the occasional whiff of cat pee emanating from your manky turquoise-and-brown-scratch sofa (no amount of Febreze would make it go away), until you could finally afford to replace it with a brand new fabric sofa which your toddler will then vomit all over but that's quite another story, anyway, you remember the smell and now it's in your laundry room and you wonder if one of the cats has gone senile and is this the smell that will linger in your guest bathroom (which is just off the laundry room) for the next couple of years until the cats finally die after what will no doubt be a long and costly deterioration dotted with many more puddles of urine, faeces (preferably runny) and bile. If you still get that kitten you can't say I didn't warn you.