Good news: Cat Daddy has fixed the Sureflap, which is astounding as he is, shall we say, not a natural handyman. It turns out that the sensors just needed a good old clean. So we will not have to spend £150 on the snazzy space-age Sureflap with hub (although I was looking forward to the adventure of figuring it out).
Bad news: Although Louis Catorze is continuing to go out through the Sureflap, he won’t come in. Even when we turned it into a manual swing door, he still wouldn’t come in. He will either enter the house through the bifold doors if they’re open, or just stay out all night if they’re not.
When Catorze first came to live with us, it took him several months to learn to go out through the cat flap and another few weeks to come in again. And now history is repeating itself. Going out is fine. But, because of previous failed attempts to come in, he has either been discouraged from trying again or (more likely) he is so thick that he has forgotten what to do.
We have scrubbed the Sureflap with plain hot water, in case there was a cleaning product residue that Catorze didn’t like. We have sprinkled catnip in the tunnel (I’m not joking). We have tried using brute force, which REALLY didn’t go well. But, whereas he used to push the door with his head when coming in, he now won’t.
And we have checked and double-checked the way his chip activates the latch, and it has worked fine every time but one. (That one time was when we were trying the brute force method, so we can’t be sure whether the fault lay with the Sureflap, his chip or his Exorcist-style struggling and writhing.)
Next steps are as follows:
1. Further studies of exactly what happens to the latch when his chip activates it, to be sure that it’s opening properly every single time.
2. Cat flap retraining.
3. A trip to the vet to see if his chip has been dislodged. (This only happens to one cat in every 873 billion. We just KNOW it will be him.)
I will be back at school in just over a week, so it looks as if Cat Daddy will have to be responsible for conducting any cat flap retraining. I have no idea how to break the happy news to him.
louiscatorze.com 
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