It’s official: Louis Catorze is bad for our health. Three weeks ago, whilst Cat Daddy was away, I sat with Catorze on my legs and my my feet outstretched and resting on the coffee table. We spent the day fixed in that position watching back-to-back X Files together, including that episode where Agent Scully has to deal with a barking, snarling dog infected with an alien virus. (And, no, Sa Maj didn’t even flick a whisker at the barking and snarling. This is no doubt because he carries the same alien virus and therefore he knows his own kind, in the same way that zombies never attack other zombies.)

Anyway, at the end of our 10-hour fairly lengthy spook-marathon, I tried to get up but I couldn’t. My left leg (upper calf, lower thigh and behind the knee) had completely seized up, and it has been painful ever since. I don’t suppose sitting at length with my legs in an over-flexed position, and with a 3kg weight on them, was the best thing to do, but it’s too late now.

As a result, I am struggling to walk and my daily routine now includes the attractiveness of a limp and a thigh-to-ankle TubiGrip. Naturellement people have been asking what happened, and I have been too embarrassed to admit that it was a Laziness With Cat injury but I have lost track of which lie I have told to which person. (I know, I know, I should have just told the same lie to everyone instead of telling some people that I tripped on a wonky paving slab and others that it was a half-marathon training injury, but I didn’t think this through.)

These last few weeks of the school year have felt like months. And this picture of Sa Maj just about sums up my place in it all; I am like a portrait cat trying to fit into a landscape sun puddle: