What are your daily habits?
In the summer months, they mostly involve efforts to escape the evil pollen: lighting beeswax candles, swallowing antihistamines, applying eye drops, that kind of thing. Fun! However, I haven’t had much success, and this is mostly Louis Catorze’s fault. If you share a house with an animal who goes outdoors during allergy season, any avoidance measures taken are rendered utterly useless.
Earlier in the week, I was lying on the sofa with my head on Cat Daddy’s lap, watching television. Catorze clattered through the cat flap, fresh from offending the parakeets / pigeons / foxes / squirrels / whoever, and, naturellement, he was displeased to see his favourite place occupied.
There would have been room for both of us to coexist happily, but Catorze wanted his papa’s lap to himself. So, to send me packing, he shook his horrible, polleny fur into my face.
This was how the sequence of events unfolded:
1. Toxic pieces of invisible plant weaponry sting my eyes like acid.
2. I scream, sit up and instinctively rub my eyes.
3. Scream startles little sod, sending him clattering back out through the cat flap.
4. Cat Daddy: “Aww! You scared him!”
5. Me: “But … my eyes!”
6. Cat Daddy: “We were about to start Boys’ Club, and you ruined it!”
7. Silence, tumbleweed, crickets for remainder of evening.
After that incident, I was determined to step up the Catorzian coiffure and brush him as much as possible especially if he’d just come in from outside.
My first attempt was as follows:
1. Brush Catorze, stupidly choosing the hottest time of the day to do this.
2. Brushing makes me too hot.
3. Switch on fan.
4. Fan blows polleny fur all over the room.
5. Some of the polleny fur settles on my face and sticks to my lip balm, giving me a sort of poisonous cat hair moustache.
6. I splutter and spit, going “Pthuh pthuh pthuh” trying to get rid of moustache.
7. My “Pthuh pthuh pthuh” startles Catorze, who takes off outside to get all polleny again.
8. The whole tragic cycle repeats itself, I guess until grass pollen season is over.
I’m pretty sure that, even if I locked myself in a lead-lined vault – the same one that I would like to lock him in, to stop him from going out and causing trouble – Sa Maj would teleport in, all covered in pollen, roll all over me before teleporting back out again. And he would take the vault key with him, leaving me trapped to ensure the continued sanctity of Boys’ Club.
I give up. Is there any point in trying to do anything with him around? (Thank you to our recent guest for these fabulous photos of the little sod.)
louiscatorze.com 
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