I came downstairs this morning to find the living room looking like this, and my initial thought was, “How cute: Cat Daddy has set up a viewing platform for his boy to watch the world go by.”

However, the truth was somewhat different; it turned out that, late last night, after I had gone to bed, Cat Daddy had heard a commotion outside and gone to investigate. And, as soon as the front door was open, Louis Catorze had bolted off into The Forbidden Front and refused to come back.

The shutters were open so that Cat Daddy could keep a lookout for Catorze’s pathetic face meowing to be let in again. The Fortnum and Mason box thing was where Cat Daddy spent ages sitting, because he couldn’t see out properly from the sofa, and the stool was in place not as a viewing platform but as a resting place for the bottle of wine he needed to fuel his vigil.

“Can you believe it?” Cat Daddy sighed. “I didn’t dare go to bed leaving him outside at The Front. Yet, every time I tried to catch him, he’d run away, then stop and scream for a bit, then run further away. So I had to sit there until really late and wait for him to decide to come back.”

“At least we’ve learned that he comes back,” I said.

“Yeah,” Cat Daddy countered, “but we’ve also learned that he’s a little shit.”

Oh dear. Maybe Louis Catorze needs to be told that, if he keeps up this kind of behaviour, Papa Noël won’t be stopping by …