On Saturday, Cat Daddy invited two of his friends over for lunch. I hadn’t met them before but, since they were coming all the way from Italy just to watch our football team, I was pretty sure that I’d like them.
As soon as they arrived, Louis Catorze came pitter-pattering down the hallway. Our guests – yes, they were both men, merci for asking – stopped in their tracks and exclaimed, “A black cat!”
Oh dear, I thought. Not a good start. But their surprise wasn’t dismay but DELIGHT, because they have a black cat who looks exactly like Catorze. Startlingly so, in fact. Their cat apparently has “lots of names” but the latest one is Pipi, short for “pipistrello”, the Italian word for “bat”. (We refrained from mentioning the many names that Cat Daddy has for Catorze, none of which are repeatable in polite company.)
Then, before I knew it, Cat Daddy had told his friends all about Le Blog and had produced Catorze’s guest book for them to sign.
Now, when I meet new people, I like to keep most of my cat freakishness concealed until I know that they will respond favourably (and I regard any reaction that isn’t backing away in horror as “favourable”). So I was quite mortified to have all this laid out within an hour of our guests’ arrival. Astonishingly, seemed to absorb it as if it were perfectly normal, although they did add that, in Italy, guest books were “for museums, maybe weddings, but not cats”.
During lunch, our guests told us about a town called Vicenza, whose inhabitants are historically rumoured to eat cats. Apparently if you want to insult someone from this town, all you have to do is call them a “mangia gatti” (“cat-eater”). Most normal cats probably wouldn’t like this kind of talk. But Catorze was so happy to be photographed and stroked by new male friends that he didn’t care … or perhaps he knows that nobody would bother trying to eat him because there’s only enough meat for a couple of tiny bits of antipasti.
Our visitors signed Catorze’s book before they left. They also mooted the idea of a guest book for their cat, which Le Roi thinks is a great idea. In fact, he says it’s the absolute MINIMUM that any human should do for their cat.
louiscatorze.com 
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