O Qualyway, O Qualyway!

My furry pal Max has been reading up on the many superstitions connected to his species. True to his fussy personality, he has chosen the ones that he likes as being true, while he denies all the others. He agrees that cats are faithfully protected by divine beings, but he declines to pull Freya's chariot (too much work). He warns me that I had better follow the Egyptian rite if I should outlive him, which means I'll be shaving off my eyebrows to mourn his passing.

Max's favorite is this: "A well-known cure for a stye in the eye is to stroke it with a black cat's tail (a tom for a woman, a queen for a man) and say,

"I poke thee, I don't poke thee,
I poke the queff that's under the 'ee,
O qualyway, O qualyway!"

In my neighborhood, there are a curiously large number of black cats, and there are a few pet beliefs related to that. Firstly that there must have been a common ancestor --some great-granddaddy cat --and second, that there are so many of them because there are also a curiously large number of anarchists hereabouts. Black cats symbolize both direct action and, for many, Anarchism as well.