I was lying in bed, hiding from the maelstrom of a typical weekday morning (THREE female members of the family, divided by ONE bathroom doesn’t compute) when the cry rang out.

“The cat’s ears are bleeding!”

It took a while to sink in. “The. Cat’s. Ears. Are. Bleeding.”

It sounds horrible, but how could that happen? Had she been scuba diving in the local pond, come up too quickly and suffered the bends?

Then my heart started pounding. It was my fault. The neighbours had been away so I’d turned up the volume to 11 while blasting out Led Zeppelin II, known by connoisseurs as “The Metal Album.”

Jimmy Page had made my cat’s ears bleed – and I’d loaded the gun.

There would be an RSPCA prosecution. I’d make the second lead item on Midlands Today, after the latest update on the spread of ragwort on the Welsh Marches.

I started imagining the damning newspapers headlines: “Whole Lotta Lout! Sicko shatters pussy’s eardrum with Led Zep racket.”

But then Millie, the moggy with the offending ears, was plonked on the bed for me to inspect. Because if anything goes wrong with the cat, that’s what happens: I take her to the vet. I spend more money on that cat than on beer. I can’t afford to binge drink.

To my relief (and I hope you’re not eating your breakfast at this point) the bleeding was not from within the ears, but from without. There were bloody scratches on the exterior of the once furry flaps.

This was very important to me because it meant I was in the clear – and so was Jimmy Page. “Ahh, poor Millie,” I said to the children, empathetically. While inside I was thinking: YES!

It appears our mog is self-harming. She has taken to a feline version of “cutting,” a practice common among abuse victims, addicts and troubled teenagers.

It’s a low-esteem/control thing, for cats. She’s into overly-attentive grooming, cleaning the backs of her ears so assiduously with her paws that she scratches away the hair and makes herself bleed. It’s like living with Janis Joplin.

So we’ve got a traumatised, mentally disturbed cat. We gave her everything (the catnip toys, the sheepskin rug, a tin of Sheba at Christmas) and this is what you get.