After doing well for a couple of weeks, Louis Catorze isn’t looking so good right now.

We started tapering down his steroids to one a day on 1st November and to alternate days from 8th November. He was fine for that first week but, during the second, his itchiness and bald patches crept back. So he is now back on one pill a day.

We had hoped for him to be drug-free by now, so it’s a little disappointing. And the little sod has been somewhat subdued. However, being unwell hasn’t stopped him from being a massive idiot.

One night he did a real number on Cat Daddy by disappearing at The Front on his watch, although this serves Cat Daddy right for letting him out when he was too drunk to monitor the situation properly.

I went downstairs at 3am to find out why Cat Daddy hadn’t come to bed and why all the lights were on, and I discovered him on the sofa, having dozed off with the window open and then woken up with no idea of whether Catorze was in or out. So he had been sitting there, shivering, for about two hours, waiting for him to come in.

Incidentally, the little sod WAS in, and had been under our bed the whole time.

And, last week, Cat Daddy made the grim discovery of TWO bird corpses in the garden, with much of the flesh eaten away. This kind of thing is not Catorze’s MO but he cannot be fully eliminated from our enquiries; even if he didn’t do the eating, stealing someone else’s tasty morsel, just for fun, is right up his street. We suspect that that’s what he did with the curly-haired rat four years ago (https://louiscatorze.com/2016/08/14/a-bon-chat-bon-rat/) and he would absolutely be stupid/rude enough to creep into the same fox hole and steal their dinner a second time.

Worse yet, when Cat Daddy went to dispose of the evidence in the park bin, he came across That Neighbour. Not only is That Neighbour a prolific local activist who would have regarded this as fly-tipping but we have already bumped into him many times when disposing of Catorze’s kills, and each time we have had to stage elaborate theatrics to hide our actions. So, after exchanging pleasantries for longer than is appropriate when one party is clutching a plastic bag containing decomposing animal parts, Cat Daddy had to divert his route and pretend he was walking to the supermarket, and consequently a one-minute job ended up taking him about half an hour.

Here is Catorze, being his usual self and giving not a single hoot about the trouble he’s causing: