On Thursday, after a series of skin-scraping and hair-plucking tests, Louis Catorze returned from his vet appointment looking worse than ever. He looks so bad that, if a stranger in the street were to see him, they’d scoop him up and take him straight to a rescue.

Ideally he would have a tag saying, “I AM NOT A STRAY: I have a home and a plentiful food supply, my skin problems look dreadful but are being treated, and that pitiful, gut-churning screaming is just my normal voice” but I don’t suppose he would wear a collar. Plus that’s a lot of text to fit onto a small tag.

This time I left Cat Daddy to do the packaging-up and the transportation, as we didn’t want a repeat of those previous incidents.* Here he is, striding purposefully through the park with the screaming bag of fur, and I’ve added a sombre Noir filter to match the general mood du jour:

*Incident 1: I hurt my neck and shoulder trying to restrain Sa Maj for his flea treatment. Consequence: cancellation of our Paris trip.

*Incident 2: I hurt my back carrying him home from his vet appointment, and Cat Daddy was away. Consequence: I was left stranded in the park opposite Le Château, and the only readily-available local people whose phone numbers I had were those whom Catorze had pissed off in some way.

We were all set for another steroid shot but, when we told the vet that the last one had been very short-lived, she advised against a second for the time being. It seems that steroid shots can make fungal infections worse and, although we are pretty sure that this isn’t what Catorze has, Cat Daddy and I agreed to try and rule it out before bombarding him with more treatments. So we decided to do the parasite and fungal infection skin scraping tests there and then, and to leave the second steroid shot until we had the results.

As expected, the little sod completely lost it during the tests, screaming, climbing all over Cat Daddy’s shoulders, clawing the poor vet nurse which then led to her having to deploy the strait-towel, and so on. To be honest I don’t really blame him. I can’t think of anything worse than being taken to a place you hate and having already-sore skin poked and scratched whilst the people who are supposed to care for you just stand and watch. When it was all over, it was a relief for every single one of us.

Cat Daddy and I remain mystified. I even wondered if perhaps Catorze might be allergic to The Special One (the merino wool scarf that I’m knitting at the moment), but, to my knowledge, he doesn’t sleep on the scarf, and his contact with it is limited to batting at the yarn with his paws and trying to kill it as I knit. Pets who are allergic to wool usually sleep on blankets or carpets containing the offending substance; could Catorze be so freakishly sensitive that he reacts to wool just by being in a room with it?

Anyway, the mite/parasite test came back all clear, and I am prepared to bet Le Château and all its contents on the fungal one saying the same thing in 2 weeks’ time. In the meantime, we are giving the little sod plenty of extra love – or, as Cat Daddy puts it, “It’s all about HIM, as usual.”