We hope you’ve had a lovely few days. Louis Catorze spent much of Christmas Day asleep, waking only to eat and to thrash around in the discarded wrapping paper. We treated him to some Parma ham fat and, after the first piece, the cheeky sod let out an AUDIBLE SCOWL because I wasn’t quick enough delivering the second.
My sister, mamma of Otis and Roux, called me for some cat flap advice a couple of days ago. Louis Catorze took around five months to learn to go out through the cat flap, and another couple of weeks to learn to come in again, so I don’t know whether this makes me the best person to advise (if the thickest cat in the world can learn, anyone can) or the absolute worst (clearly my training methods were shite).
After completing their period of house arrest, Otis and Roux were ready to be turned loose into the great wide world outside. However, the cats couldn’t figure out that the flap would open if they pushed against it. The humans tried to give them an encouraging shove to send them on their way, but they weren’t having it.
Training Catorze was excruciating. Like Otis and Roux, he didn’t seem to want to push with his head, either. Instead, he chose to go outside via a long and convoluted route out of the bathroom window, across next door’s conservatory, along next door’s side fence, across their back fence, back along our fence, onto the barbecue and then down onto the ground.
Catorze would often burst back in through the bathroom window, clattering the wooden Venetian blind and scaring us. And, sometimes, our bathroom products would, erm, travel with him. We once lost our shower gel and shampoo, then later found them on next door’s conservatory roof. Another time, we heard a crash followed by steady, rhythmic knocking. When we scraped up the courage to investigate, we found that, during the Catorzian scramble indoors, he had somehow caught a bottle of mouthwash in the slats of the blind and it was knocking on the window as it swung. Even if I spent the rest of my life trying, I’m sure I could never hang a bottle of mouthwash in a Venetian blind like that.
I told my sister to tape the cat flap open, gradually reducing the opening over time. When I’d tried to do this with Catorze, although it (eventually) achieved the desired result, the cat flap didn’t like being taped, so we propped it open with sticks of ever-decreasing length. Obviously, when Catorze or whichever random neighbourhood impinger came through, their arse would dislodge the stick, slamming the flap shut and trapping Catorze inside or outside (depending on who it was that had come in). So someone* would have to keep retrieving the stick and restarting the whole process.
*Me.
Otis and Roux came and went happily, all day, through the taped-open cat flap. When night fell, the humans didn’t want Foxy Loxy or Mr Badger creeping in so, once the cats were in, the cat flap was locked. And that was when the cats decided to start pushing with their heads.
The next day, Roux was the first to successfully push with her head and go out and in, soon followed by her brother. And that was it: training complete.
Part of me was glad that my sister only had short-lived stress, worrying about the cats running away or getting stuck in the cat flap tunnel. And part of me was jealous as hell for the way that Catorze had had me messing about with flap-propping sticks, covering the cat flap with opaque paper (in case the transparent force-field was upsetting Catorze), spraying the cat flap with catnip to encourage him to push, chasing out interlopers who wandered in and whatever other desperate measures I took.
All is now well with the world, although Catorze is mildly disappointed that his cat-cousins didn’t drag out the circus for a little longer. Where’s the fun in making it easy for the humans?
louiscatorze.com 
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