Describe your most memorable holiday.
I have zero memory for places I’ve been to, so my most recent holiday will have to do. And it’s so recent that, erm, we’re still here! Cat Daddy and I are in the same part of the Scottish Highlands that we visited last year, and I’m writing this post whilst looking out over exquisite scenery and drinking tea.
I have brought Stephen King’s “If It Bleeds” as part of my cheery holiday reading arsenal. Mine is the English version, but I prefer the look of the French one:
One of our friends has very kindly agreed to live with Louis Catorze during our absence. When she came for the orientation last week, he galloped straight past me and ran to greet her, up-tailed and screaming. And he was happily snuggled up on her lap within a couple of hours of her moving in. Bastard cat.
Cat Daddy says he’s loving being away from Catorze. That said, we could be disturbed by felines of a different kind, if it’s true that panthers have emerged from, erm, wherever they have been hiding, and have been seen in Scotland. I would love to live here, although the thought of wild panthers would make me worried for Catorze’s safety. Would we have to supervise his outdoor ICB, for fear of him becoming panther food? Would they recognise him as their own kind and take him into their fold? In fact … would we even be able to differentiate between his form and that of a marauding panther, if looking from afar? If you have a cat, you will know that the same one can look very different in different photos, depending on the angle and the setting. Catorze can look like a regal, velvety thoroughbred in one picture and, in the next, like something that the wind blew in from a nearby landfill site.
Just before we came on holiday, I saw a black cat at the end of the garden, atop our upended fire pit. There was plenty around to give a sense of scale, but somehow this cat looked large to me and I thought he might be an interloper.
I stared at his chiselled face, which was quite unlike Catorze’s ball head, and he stared back at me. When I approached to take a closer look, he jumped down from his perch and bounded towards me with the inimitable “Mwah! Mwahhhh!” that could only belong to Le Roi.
We black cat people pride ourselves on knowing our own cats. So … what just happened? Was this one of those veil-crossing moments, like scrying in a mirror or crystal ball, when your own reflection starts to warp and look weird to you? Or was it like doing magic mushrooms, when everything looks weird to you?
Either way, the “It must have been some other black cat” excuse, which I use whenever there’s trouble, could actually be more convincing than I originally thought?
Here are some of the very different looks of Catorze, which prove my point perfectly. Who would ever imagine that these were the same cat? In fact, who would ever imagine that some of these were even a cat?
louiscatorze.com 
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