What an insane week it’s been at Le Château: I am back at work after a whole summer off, Cat Daddy has been away on business and is preparing to go again next week, we’ve had a dead mouse in the bathroom and Le Roi’s booster jabs were due today.

But the one piece of great news is that, because Louis Catorze is not any medication at the moment, he was able to go to our local vet and have a standard vaccine, rather than enduring a 90-minute round trip to the rescue centre vet for the special non-live vaccine that only they can supply. Until now he’s had to have that because Atopica isn’t compatible with standard booster injections and so, unsurprisingly, I opted for the 90-minute round trip rather than risk a freakishly psycho FrankenRoi. It feels like a luxury not to have to do that anymore.

“I wonder if the vet will compliment him on his appearance?” I shouted in the car, so that I could be heard over Catorze’s screaming. “He’s looking really good at the moment.”

“Yeah, but it’s all relative,” Cat Daddy yelled back. “Of all the cats that she sees, where do you think he would rank on a scale from 1 to 10?”

Silence, tumbleweed, crickets. Even Catorze shut up at that point.

Anyway, after Louis Catorze’s initial “Quoi? Here again? I thought we were done with this place?” everything went ok. He has beefed up to a whopping 3.49kg, which came as a surprise to the vet as cats usually LOSE weight during a break from steroids. There was the usual yelling and swearing (from him) when his ears were examined, and the procedure had to be aborted when he unveiled an ingenious new trick: bending forward and wedging his head between his thighs so that his ears were inaccessible. (Imagine a cat preparing to do a forward roll but not actually rolling, and just remaining in a tight ball. Little sod.)

We’re home now and the post-vet sulk appears to be a thing of the past, with Louis Catorze instantly forgiving us (or forgetting) and happily pitter-pattering about our feet. I hope this peace is a taste of the weekend to come; we could all do with it.