louiscatorze.com

Most pet owners will admit that they look after their animals better than they look after themselves, and I am no exception. When I visited the doctor recently about my recurrent headaches*, the consultation went something like this:

Doctor: “For how long have you been getting these headaches?”

Me: “I don’t know.”

Her: “How often do you get them?”

Me: “I don’t know.”

Her: “How long does each one last?”

Me: “I don’t know.”

Her: “When was the most recent one?”

Me: “I don’t know.”

[Silence, tumbleweed, crickets]

*Mum, if you are reading this, don’t worry. Everything is fine.

Now, had these been Louis Catorze’s headaches and not mine, I would have immediately been able to say that the he’d had them every 3.4 days for the last three weeks, that they lasted 22 minutes on average and that the last one started two days ago at 8:43am.

Last week, once again I demonstrated the extent to which we put our little sods first. After stuffing my face with salted caramel cheesecake, I decided that I wanted more cheesecake. However, when I opened the fridge, the cheesecake dish slid out and fell onto the floor.

Scientists may well tell us that matter cannot both implode and explode at once – or, if it did, the two would cancel each other out – but clearly they have never dropped a dish of cheesecake on the kitchen floor. Because I was a couple of glasses of Crémant under, both my clean-up efforts and my judgement were pretty shambolic; after a perfunctory sweep with the dustpan and brush, I tried to salvage a couple of spoonfuls of cheesecake from the mess and only stopped when I realised I was crunching on glass**.

**Mum, if you are reading this, don’t worry. Everything is fine.

Cat Daddy, a few minutes later: “Did you clean up all the glass from the floor?”

Me, aware that I probably hadn’t: “Yeah.”

Him: “Are you sure?”

Me, pouring myself some more Crémant: “Uh-huh.”

Him: “I really hope so. We can’t have HIM hurting his little paws.”

HIS LITTLE PAWS. OH. MON. DIEU.

Before Cat Daddy could even draw breath I was scouring the floor for fragments of glass, looking at the same spots multiple times from different angles to see if I could catch them glinting. I picked up every single piece by hand, threw them away, then did another sweep with the dustpan and brush AND a further sober sweep the next morning. We have broken glass countless times in this house and Catorze has never come a cropper, but HIS LITTLE PAWS.

Lessons learned have been as follows:

1. The universe has ways of letting me know that one helping of cheesecake is enough.

2. I would – and did – crawl over broken glass for Catorze. And doesn’t he look appreciative?