On Friday evening Louis Catorze was badgering us to let him out at The Front, so Cat Daddy obligingly opened the window. This has happened many times before without incident but, on this occasion, Catorze poked his head through the open window, yowled and swished his puffy tail. And some unknown being outside was yowling back.
When he looked outside, Cat Daddy saw that it was Goliath, that massive ginger cat with whom Catorze has had at least one altercation (to our knowledge). And, as we debated whether or not we should pull him back inside and close the window, he shot out.
I was concerned that our neighbours would hear the horrendous racket and come out to see what was going on (yes, it’s happened before), so I decided to try and recapture Catorze. By the time I’d put on my shoes and gone outside, he had positioned himself on one side of the road, with Goliath, three times his size, having run away from him (!) to the other side, and the pair of them were staring each other down like boxers, yowling up a storm. I approached Catorze, but the little shit ran underneath Family Next Door’s car where he knew he wouldn’t be caught.
The yowling continued. And, because the street was empty, the sound echoed like a peal of bells, in the most embarrassing fashion imaginable.
At that point, my options were as follows:
1. Wriggle on my belly underneath the car to grab my screaming cat, risking not only personal injury and failure but also being captured doing so on Family Next Door’s Ring doorbell camera.
2. Leave the cats to it, go back indoors, turn up the television to drown out the God-awful sound and prepare to trot out the “It must have been some other black cat” line, if anyone asked.
Since I didn’t really want Family Next Door gathering around a laptop screen and watching that video with their popcorn, I went for option 2.
The little sod rolled back about half an hour later and we let him in through the window. And, within a few minutes, he was battering at the shutters to go out again. It was a firm, hard NON to that. In fact, if this is the kind of caper that we can expect when we let him out at The Front, it’s going to be a firm, hard NON to it for the foreseeable future.
I shall say it again: he is a senior cat who should be taking it easy. Why is he like this?
Now all I can do is await the comments on our local neighbourhood forum: “What a disturbance. I thought this was a nice neighbourhood. [Anonymous]”
louiscatorze.com 
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