Share a story about the furthest you’ve ever travelled from home.
Our part of west London was in the news last week, due to an inmate who absconded from Wandsworth prison. After much fuss and police helicopters hovering through the night, he was finally recaptured in, erm, Chiswick. Had I known he’d be there, I might have wandered down to look out for him, in the hope of scooping the £20,000 reward money.
Wandsworth and Chiswick are about six miles apart. I think even without the army survival training and insider help that this bloke had had, I’d have been able to make it further than that after four days on the run. In fact, even Louis Catorze, with his short legs, could have made it further than that (probably by slipping unnoticed into an Ocado van).
If you have an outdoor cat without a tracker, it’s impossible to know where they really go. However, the furthest that Catorze has been, to our knowledge, is the far side of the park over the road. After one of my surgeries (I don’t recall which one because I’ve had that many), the surgeon prescribed a short, supervised recovery walk every day, and laps of the park were a good way of monitoring my progress. So we set off one evening, and Catorze decided to escape out at The Front as we left and followed us, screaming.
Looking back, we should have recaptured him and locked him back up again but, like most escaped convicts, he’s impossible to recapture if he doesn’t want to be recaptured. Plus we didn’t think he would actually follow us all the way across the road and through the park.
He did.
By the time we’d reached the far side of the park, we had resigned ourselves to the fact that, for our first lap, at least, we would be pursued by a screaming cat. However, we didn’t quite make a full lap together because a dog walker then appeared, with two dogs running free, off the lead.
The dogs scampered up to Catorze and, for a second, I actually felt my soul leave my body as I prepared to jump in and save him from the ensuing carnage. Despite all his bravado with dogs when he’s on his own turf, Catorze decided that a confrontation outside the safe confines of the Zone Occupée and the Zone Libre (all Catorzian territory) was a step too far and he was off, hurtling back home at breakneck speed, with the dogs deciding NOT to give chase. We then finished our lap at equally breakneck speed so that we could let him back into Le Château.
Me: “That was negligent of us. We should never have let him follow us. We were lucky that the dogs and the owner were nice.”
Cat Daddy: “It’s fine. Cats go into parks all the time.”
They absolutely do not. I can count on two fingers the number of cats I’ve seen in parks in my entire life.
I’d like to say that Catorze learned his lesson after that, but he didn’t (either because he’s so thick that he forgot, or because he just doesn’t care). He still yearns for far-flung adventures at The Front and is always trying to escape out. And if it were up to The Fun Parent (Cat Daddy), he’d be there all the time.
Luckily The Boring Parent (me) is at hand to rein things in and spoil the party. It’s a hard NON to anything that might involve marauding dogs.
louiscatorze.com 
Leave a comment