Cat Daddy and I are feeling very smug indeed at the way in which we have used almost every last scrap of turkey. We have had turkey pie and turkey curry, and I am about to make and freeze a large batch of turkey and garlic soup, ready for when I return to my plague pit of a school in January. The only part of the turkey that we didn’t use was the giblets. Cat Daddy spent some time painstakingly boiling and chopping them for Louis Catorze, who took one sniff and walked away.
Cat Daddy: “Oh, he’ll eat it eventually.”
He absolutely will not. In fact, that’s the last thing he will do. And you ought to know this.
Ever since The Curious Incident of the Jet-Black Mouse in the Night-Time, I have been trying to figure out what on earth it was that Catorze brought in.
Oui, Mesdames et Messieurs: nothing says “The magic of the Yuletide season” quite like being TUC and Googling “black mice”, “black rats”, “black shrews” and every other black rodent and rodent-like creature known to science.
Catorze’s offering was too velvety to have been a regular mouse, too bald-tailed to have been a rat, and it didn’t have the creepy pink hands* of a mole. What WAS it? And why didn’t I think to take a picture? (Well, ok, I know why. I was a few shots of vodka under, that’s why.) After a group of so-called friends – you know who you are – scared me with stories of roof rats, I am now hoping beyond hope that there isn’t a family of these critters living in or under Le Château somewhere, and that Catorze won’t unveil them one by one at some highly inopportune time.
*If you can stand it, Google pictures of moles and look at their disproportionately huge, terrifying hands. And, if you are especially brave, Google “star-nosed mole”. This creature will blow your mind, and is the sort of thing that would keep Lovecraft awake at night.
In either horribly coincidental (I hope so) or related (PLEASE NO) news, some sort of entity, most likely a squirrel but possibly a demon, has been scratching and scrabbling outside our bedroom window in the early hours of the morning. The sound itself isn’t enough to unduly disturb my sleep at night. However, Catorze’s response to the sound most certainly is.
As you are aware, the little sod is manic anyway, and he’s just had his steroid shot which has made him even worse. But this sound triggers his Urge To Kill switch like nothing else and, after bouncing around on the bed at length, he eventually settles in his classic Rodent Duty pose, on top of my chest. I have to make sure that the shutters are very firmly closed at night because, if they’re not, he tries to pry them open to create a platform on which to jump, causing even more of a disturbance.
I had hoped that spending the festive season relaxing quietly at home would be … well … relaxing and quiet. I should have known better.
louiscatorze.com 
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