One day, Cat Daddy and I would like to go to New Orleans for Hallowe’en. The voodoo, the Frenchness and the stark differences between their lifestyle and ours make it a very intriguing place to visit.

Until we make it over there, one of my favourite things to watch is Cajun Justice on Amazon Prime. It’s reality series that follows a Louisiana police department, which is not my usual kind of thing, but what makes it appeal to me are the folklore and the intrinsic part that it plays in the Louisiana way of life.

Members of the community call the police for supernatural reasons such as creepy noises in the attic, as well as for regular things such as, erm, accidentally running over a wild hog and disputing ownership of the carcass. Does it belong to the person who ran it over, or to the person on whose property it landed after the collision? The gentlemen involved couldn’t agree, and they refused to share it, so, in the end, the police lady told them that neither of them could have it and that it belonged to the state.

One day, the police were called to a dispute between neighbours who had been at war for some time; one household was “Cajun” (of local origin) and the other was “Redneck” (not of local origin) and, apparently, the two aren’t compatible.

In this case, the Rednecks’ cat had wandered onto the Cajuns’ property and “disappeared”, the suggestion being that the Cajuns had done something nasty to it. The Cajun neighbour was denying all knowledge, and, of course, the only way to prove it either way would have been finding the cat, dead or alive.

Police officer: “There’s a cat right there. [Points] Is that not y’all cat?”

[Cat strolls casually across the grass without a care in the world]

[Silence, tumbleweed, crickets]

Redneck lady, looking mortified: “Erm … yeah.”

[Laughter from wrongly-accused Cajun, no apology given by gun-jumping Rednecks, zero shits given by cat regarding the trouble caused]

Louis Catorze would have an absolute ball if he were a Louisiana cat, so much so that I gave serious thought to taking him with us on our trip. This is what I think he would love about the place:

⁃ Searing heat

⁃ Abundant nutria (large, toothy rodents regarded as vermin)

⁃ He would be first in line to cause neighbourhood discord and waste police time (although he manages the former perfectly well here, and it’s only a matter of time before he also achieves the latter)

⁃ He would be worshipped by voodoo priests as some sort of holy deity

However, the disadvantages are rather concerning:

⁃ Alligators

⁃ Snakes

⁃ Everyone has guns

⁃ He could be mistaken for a nutria by an alligator, a snake or a person with a gun

Hmmm. Perhaps it’s just as well he doesn’t have to travel, and that the world comes to him. And that is exactly the way it should be for a Sun King.