Raptures

In the final raucous minutes of the match, Max whipped in a delicious cross to the far post, where his cat, scampering on to the gleaming floodlit pitch, using her hind legs to leap high into the air, higher than all the defenders and attackers, headed in the winning goal, sending the crowd into raptures and ensuring her place in football folklore.

The poets of the Augustan age would have celebrated such a meadow with the warmest raptures, and peopled its green expanse with all the sylvan demi-gods of their beautiful mythology.