Good news: despite our silly cat’s efforts to distract and interrupt the workmen, the patio area is almost done. Bad news: when choosing the colour of the paving slabs, we completely neglected to take into account Louis Catorze’s disgusting paws. See below for an indication of both the problem and Catorze’s level of contrition, summed up perfectly in a single shot. (The photo is actually a still from a video of the cheeky little sod rolling.)

Le Roi’s footprints have had a curious mind of their own lately, appearing in odd places such as the middle of the bathroom yet with no trail of prints leading up to that point. Of course, those ones can easily be cleaned whereas, sadly, it seems that there’s not much we can do about the patio ones. We went through our options the other day, which appear to be as follows:

1. Ask Cultivate London to take up all the slabs and replace them with darker ones. (Rather princessy and embarrassing, so no.)
2. Spend half an hour a day cleaning the patio. (A pain in the arse, so no.)
3. Ban Catorze from the patio. (He would ignore us and go out there regardless, so no.)
4. Rehome Catorze. (Nobody would have him, so no.)

(The last 2 were Cat Daddy’s idea.)

Cat Daddy spent half the weekend on the Wickes website, looking for some sort of high-pressure water jet thing “to hose down that unsightly, God-awful mess”.

I hope he was talking about the paw prints.