Month: Jan 2024

Un rendez-vous avec la gouvernante

~ iamthesunking ~ 19 Comments

Louis Catorze’s three main bêtes noires are as follows:

1. The guitar.

2. The vacuum cleaner (although he’s more offended than scared by this, and he screams at whoever is using it to shut up).

3. The pestle and mortar (again, insulting rather than frightening).

The little sod was subjected to the third one at length last weekend, when I made red curry paste from scratch. But it was well worth it because I was making lunch for some very special pilgrims: one of them was the lady who managed Catorze’s, and his big brother Luther’s, adoptions to us.

Cat Daddy, prior to the visit: “She’s got some explaining to do.”

Me: “…”

Him: “I mean, WHY US?”

Me: “…”

Him: “His online picture was very misleading. Just like those websites where the girls look amazing in their photos, and then you’re taken by surprise when you see them in the flesh.”

Right. I’m not even going to ask.

I gave Catorze a thorough brushing before his guests’ arrival so that he looked a bit less shit glossy and smart. And he seemed to know that something was afoot because he was extra unhinged that morning, screaming and staring creepily at us as we busied ourselves with food preparation and tidying up.

Anyway, our friend was quite emotional seeing her toothy little ex-charge again, almost ten years after she found him his forever home. Catorze was very happy to see her, too, although, naturellement, he preferred her husband and his was the lap of choice.

We swapped tales of rodents, birds and slugs – well, I say “swapped” but it was just us telling them our horror stories, whilst they thought, “Rather you than us!” And we barely even scraped the surface of the vast back catalogue of Catorzian misadventures. Their cats, Clementine and Puffin, are good girls who don’t do such things (well, give or take the odd worm and frog).

Catorze pitter-pattered in and out throughout, chirping and trilling, and even jumped onto the dining table during lunch, to demand extra attention – right after we’d told our guests that he never did this. It’s a good thing that he is eating again, albeit reluctantly, because otherwise we would have made them take him back.

Our hearts were fuller after a delightful afternoon talking cats. Le Royal Guest Book was, too, after one more message in it. And, whilst we don’t want to wish time away, our minds are already flashing forward to the summer, when we hope to visit Clementine and Puffin in their idyllic countryside retreat.

Here is Sa Maj, having the time of his life with the (very well-chosen) catnip rainbow given to him by our guests. He is a very lucky boy indeed.

“Pour moi?”
Our friend was thrilled when she managed to capture The Fangs on camera.

Here are three of the worst Catorzian stories – or, rather, three of the worst Catorzian stories SO FAR – which we shared with our guests on this day:

1. The slug.

2. The bird.

3. The rat.

Ni manger, ni vivre

~ iamthesunking ~ 22 Comments

If you could un-invent something, what would it be?

Hot-smoked salmon. I’m not joking.

We have had a trying few days here at Le Château. Since The Great Salmon Grab, every time I headed for the kitchen, Louis Catorze would pitter-patter after me and sit expectantly by his bowl, hoping beyond hope that some hot-smoked salmon would appear in it, or that Marcus Wareing would knock at the door and serve something fit for a Sun King.

Neither of these things happened.

The abject disappointment that ensued triggered the most mournful and gut-wrenching whining I had ever heard. When I filled his bowl with food, and he saw that it was disgusting Orijen slop and not Michelin-starred hot-smoked salmon, he would walk away.

On one occasion, when I filled his bowl, I said, “You’d better not just walk away.”

He didn’t; he RAN away. And I mean raced off at top speed, as if I had served him live scorpions.

Cat Daddy: “He’s a ****. He won’t ****ing eat any of it. He wants salmon. And, God, that noise. That stupid ****ing whining noise.”

Catorze, very quietly and sadly, and with the pitch starting high and finishing low: “Maooooou!”

Cat Daddy, animatedly, pointing at Catorze: “Yes, THAT noise! I’m ****ing sick of it.”

Friends even suggested just giving him the salmon, but I didn’t dare; Cat Daddy was already blaming me for this whole thing, firstly for “giving him the salmon in the first place” (this wasn’t quite how it happened, but tant pis) and then for not grabbing the plate away quickly enough and therefore “letting him think that the salmon was for him”, so it was probably best not to make things worse. However, he later added that, gram for gram, the salmon was probably still cheaper than the Orijen.

After two days of hunger strike I was almost ready to take Catorze to the vet and beg for help, even though we had only recently been and the vet had confirmed that there was nothing wrong and he was just taking the piss*.

*Not the actual words used by the vet.

Then, suddenly and inexplicably, either the gods relented and decided to stop torturing us, or the planets shifted into a more auspicious alignment, or Catorze simply couldn’t be bothered to keep up the drama anymore, and SOMETHING happened. He just ate. Merci à Dieu: he ate. He didn’t eat much but, at this point, we didn’t care about quantity and were grateful for anything at all.

So now we no longer have an anorexic cat, and Cat Daddy is about 0.1% less cross with me and Catorze. All is not quite fully well with the world, but this is better than the torment of the last few days.

Communing with Satan to say, “How did I do, mon pote?”

Le roi pêcheur

~ iamthesunking ~ 28 Comments

What is your favourite animal?

Not cats. Not anymore. Not after this.

Bastard cat. I’m going to put him in an Uber and send him to someone’s house. I don’t know whose house. I don’t care whose house. It could be yours, so watch out.

I came home on Wednesday night absolutely exhausted from work, and I was about to sit down and eat my dinner when I saw that Louis Catorze’s water was running low. So I put my plate on the coffee table, picked up his water glass and went to the kitchen to refill … and, when I returned, I was met with this absolute horror show:

Saint Jésus.

Now, before you berate me for leaving my food unattended, I have done so around 8,632 times in the past and Catorze has never behaved like this, not once. I used to joke to fellow cat freaks that I would put my dinner on the floor and leave the room, just because I could. However, those glorious days have clearly melted away like frost in the morning sun, and now we are never going to be able to trust the little sod around food again.

This is a life-changing event at Le Château.

“You stopped to take a picture?” Well, what would have been the purpose of whipping away the plate at this point? I certainly wasn’t going to eat the food after this (although Cat Daddy, who is cross with me for “wasting food”, says that he would).

After he’d gorged himself on my dinner – hot-smoked salmon sourced from a fancy place which supplies high-end hotels and restaurants – Catorze was no longer interested in the boring Orijen that I’d just served him. He sniffed it, walked away, then sat on the stairs, looking pleased with himself, thinking about what he’d done and, no doubt, knowing that he’d do it again in an instant:

The devil himself.

My friend, when I told her about the incident: “What’s the moon doing right now?”

The moon:

Holy shit.

Le vieux chasseur

~ iamthesunking ~ 36 Comments

Louis Catorze’s cat-cousins, Otis and Roux, have been having the time of their lives in the great outdoors.

Otis recently caught his first mouse – or, rather, the first mouse of which we are aware. He brought it upstairs, chased it around whilst his parents slept, then took it back downstairs again. There, he waited patiently, holding the still-alive mouse in his mouth, until someone followed him, rescued the poor mouse from the jaws of death and set it free in the garden.

My sister: “I don’t understand. The previous owners said that the cats didn’t hunt.”

Me: “I feel your pain. I was also sold a non-hunter with Catorze, and what a joke that’s turned out to be.”

Her: “Do you think this will get worse?”

Me: “Well, if they’re managing to find mice in the depths of winter, spring and summer will be a veritable gold rush.”

Her: “…”

Me: “Not to mention the fact that Otis and Roux are barely even three …”

Her: “…”

Me: “So you have many, many years of mouse mayhem ahead of you.”

Her: “…”

Having successfully ensured that my sister would never sleep again, I breathed a sigh of relief that my own ageing cat will soon be hanging up his hunting gear and settling for a nice, easy life doing nothing.

Oh, wait …

Rodent Duty for Catorze, in the frost and ice.

Whilst at work last week, I received the following message from Cat Daddy:

“A present from him. He walked right past me with it. Dumped it on the floor in its death throes. Then licked the blood.”

The message was accompanied by a highly disturbing video of Catorze, with rodent, utterly unrepentant. Don’t worry, I won’t be posting the full video here, but here’s a still taken from it, showing the little sod, smoking gun in hand:

The mouse is out of sight, behind his head, but you can just about see its shadow.

Why is he doing this? HOW is he doing this?

Is he being so weird with his food because boring, dry biscuits just don’t compare to warm, pulsing rodent flesh?

And what’s with the licking? Saint Jésus, THE LICKING?

Parler sans rien dire

~ iamthesunking ~ 39 Comments

Cold, dry and bright days are my favourite kind: no sweat, no rain, and everything outside looks glorious. We were lucky enough to have had such a day last week so, naturellement, we had to ruin it by carrying a screaming cat through the park and paying £124 to be told that there’s nothing wrong with him.

(Well, that sum of money was for a combination of the consultation, the steroid shot and the ruinously-expensive-but-joyously-infrequent flea, tick and double-arse-worm treatment. We didn’t pay the whole thing just for the advice, but you get what I mean, non?)

On the way there, we saw a pretty tabby cat sitting on the roof of a neighbouring house. And, when we returned, we saw that she was still there:

My stupid brain thought that the sun was casting a shadow next to her but, in actual fact, she was deep in telepathic communication with a tuxedo comrade:

Putting the world to rights. THEIR world. Not ours.
“Don’t forget, as soon as the clock hits 3am … PARKOUR!”

When I shared the photo on my family’s WhatsApp group chat, my sister said, “Is that house in [name of street]?”

Me: “Yes, that’s right. How did you know?”

Her: “When we visited for Christmas, we walked past that same house and there were FOUR cats on that roof.”

Oh. Mon. Dieu.

Have we found the epicentre of The Mothership’s mysterious workings? Or are there many similar places around the world where her feline minions gather to telepathise? Please let me know if there has been any similarly suspicious feline activity in your neighbourhood.

Manger pour vivre

~ iamthesunking ~ 39 Comments

What snack would you eat right now?

Clearly nothing. Bastard cat.

Cat Daddy and I can’t abide food waste. So it really hurts us to be throwing away perfectly edible Orijen – especially as it’s more expensive than cocaine and gold combined – just because a certain little shit doesn’t like the way we’ve served it.

One of the benefits of Louis Catorze was that he didn’t have set mealtimes. So not only were we able to give him food if we were going out, knowing that he would happily eat it later when he was hungry, but we could tell chat-sitteurs to feed him when it suited them, not upon his command. However, if you’re having to pour boiling water onto his food, he doesn’t like it if it’s been left to soak in for ages. Once the food has absorbed too much water and gone soggy, he’s not interested.

The obvious answer to this would be to feed him only when he looks hungry. I thought this was a pretty foolproof method when it came to minimising waste: just wait until he’s circling his plate like a hungry saltwater crocodile and screaming bloody murder, right? Well, so I thought … until he looked at my labour-intensive offering, sniffed it, walked away and went outside.

He’d just been screaming for me to hurry up, SECONDS BEFOREHAND.

Cat Daddy noticed the same thing, and wondered whether Catorze just liked to know before going out that there would be food there when he returned. I can’t imagine how any animal would have evolved to think this – after all, leaving food unattended in the wild would mean some impinger taking advantage, non?

So now we can’t feed him if he’s not asking for food, nor can we feed him if he IS asking for food.

We don’t understand this animal. Someone, please, help us out here.

Weird little beast with Photoshop-effect alien eyes.

Garni de l’eau chaude

~ iamthesunking ~ 29 Comments

This is the current status for each of us here at Le Château:

Me: boiling a kettle in order to serve 0.3ml of boiling water to a cat.

Cat Daddy: shouting at me for boiling a kettle for such a minuscule amount of water when there’s a global energy crisis.*

Louis Catorze: enjoying his life of hot meals and chubbing up nicely, merci for asking.

*It’s not great, but it’s better than running the hot tap for ages until it reaches the required temperature, non? And I make a cup of tea for myself from the same kettle of water, so as not to be wasteful. Yes, that’s right: even if I don’t really want a cup of tea at that moment, I have one anyway just to be able to tell myself that I haven’t put the kettle on just for my cat.

Feeding Catorze is now quite the Herculean labour. Sometimes he sits by his plate, waiting patiently. At other times, he circles me like a hungry saltwater crocodile, screaming and screaming. And, of course, sometimes the pellets soak up too much water for Sa Maj’s liking, so we have to throw them away. But the little sod is eating, so we have, at least, achieved our objective.

However, we can’t help wondering what on earth made him decide to stop eating normally in the first place.

Are his teeth giving him trouble again?**

Did he want hot food because it’s cold outside (and, if so, how did he know that going on hunger strike would do the trick)?

Is he losing his sense of smell in his old age and finding that cold food just doesn’t have much scent-appeal, whereas hot food smells like a fine dining tasting menu?

Is it an evolutionary thing, whereby hot food more closely resembles a freshly-killed mouse or rat (eurgh)?

Was he bored of his food?

Or did he just think, “I wonder what the pathetic humans will do if I starve myself?”?

I shall await your suggestions as to which option might be correct …

**UPDATE: a trip to the vet has confirmed that there is nothing wrong with his teeth.

Hark! Is that the sound of a kettle boiling?

Même d’un bon chat, on attrape des puces

~ iamthesunking ~ 27 Comments

Louis Catorze’s Broadline has been discontinued. It’s always stressful when this kind of thing happens because, when it comes to complicated cats like him, it’s not quite as simple as just replacing the discontinued item with something else.

It’s already happened with his food, and with his bowl (well, ok, that wasn’t discontinued – I broke it), and what a saga it was each time. You’d think that, if a cat were hungry enough, they’d just eat. Nope. And you’d also think that, once they’d decided on their favourite food, they’d eat it from whatever serving vessel were provided. Also nope.

Luckily there isn’t the option of accepting or not accepting a spot-on – the little sod has no choice – but I was all ready for a quest through every spot-on treatment in existence, with each one either burning holes in him, making his fur fall out, turning him into some hideous, mutated FrankenRoi or some other catastrophic eventuality that hadn’t yet occurred to me.

The other factor is that Broadline treated both fleas and worms, so it’s imperative that any new treatment does the same, or better. Since Catorze is utterly unpillable and can even make pills disappear at will, it’s absolutely out of the question that I give him both a spot-on AND Greco a worming pill into him.

By some miracle, the vet was able to recommend the perfect solution. Not only does it treat fleas, ticks and TWO types of arse-worm (although I could have done without finding out that there are two types of arse-worm), and not only is it a spot-on liquid and not a tablet, but it only needs to be applied once every three months. Once. Every. Three. Months.

Naturellement there’s a catch: it’s excruciatingly expensive. But, for a treatment that is used so infrequently, no amount of money is too much. And, by the time Cat Daddy finds out the price, I will already have emailed the vet back and begged them to just take my money.

All we need now is for Catorze to take to it, without any drama or unexpected twists. Ahem.

Fleas in my bed? No, thank you.

Les diodes lumineuses

~ iamthesunking ~ 46 Comments

Our under-floor heating has malfunctioned again, right in the middle of our cold snap. This meant another visit from Chris the heating engineer, which was good news for Louis Catorze as he loves men. Family members, friends, delivery drivers, tradesmen, random passers-by, trick-or-treating youths … Catorze will happily accept cuddles from any or all of the above.

Aww, how cute and uncreepy.

When Chris arrived, Catorze was outside on Rodent Duty. However, when he realised that there was a new man in his Château, he raced in, screaming.

Catorze: “Mwah! Mwah! Mwahhhhh!”

Me: “Oh. Erm, sorry about our cat. He loves it when visitors come, especially men.”

Chris: “Really? It’s usually the opposite with cats. They run away from me.”

Catorze: “‘MWAHHHHH!”

Chris then took an infra-red gadget from his bag – the same kind of gadget that they use on ghost-hunting programmes to detect temperature changes – and paced around the kitchen with it facing down towards the floor. He then said, “Look at the cat!” and pointed it at Catorze, who was sitting and creepy-staring at him.

I swear to Goddess: Catorze’s body on the screen was deep teal blue, as stone-cold as the floor around him, with heat radiating just from his red eyes.

Me: “Why isn’t he hot all over? Why is the heat just in that one place?”

Chris: “Strange. It’s just his eyes, isn’t it?”

Me: “…”

Him: “…”

Catorze: “Mwah!”

Chris left quite quickly after that.

I wish I’d taken a photo of what the gadget was showing us. That said, you have all known for years that Sa Maj is not of this world, non?

Wow, BingBot, it’s as if you were actually there!

La nourriture qui réchauffe

~ iamthesunking ~ 41 Comments

Louis Catorze hasn’t been eating much lately. We had initially put this down the fact that he does nothing all day but, one morning, I came downstairs to feed him and his bowl wasn’t empty. In fact, it was three-quarters full and, judging from what Cat Daddy later said about how much food he’d given him before bed, the little sod hadn’t touched it all night. I then wondered if something could be wrong.

He doesn’t look as if anything is wrong: he’s perfectly wide-eyed, energetic and vocal. But he’s a huge liar and con artist, so we couldn’t trust him as far as we could spit.

Psycho kitty.

On that particular occasion, I emptied away his old food and gave him a new serving. He sniffed it, then looked at me and let out a disappointed whine, as if to say, “And what do you call THIS shit?” Then, when I poured a spoonful of boiling water over half of the food, he guzzled down the lot, with audible “Nyom nyom nyom” sounds.

Oh dear. So we’re back to this again.

The last time around, it was because his teeth were troubling him. This time, because he ate the dry pieces of Orijen as well as the watered ones, and because he hasn’t been eating messily, which is usually a sign of tooth bother, I’m inclined to think he’s just taking the piss. Not that it makes any difference because, even if this is the case, Catorze is SUCH a massive sod that he will starve himself before eating less-than-perfect food (or perfect food served in a less-than-perfect fashion).

At least he’s eating. And, thanks to one of his lovely pilgrims, he has his own antique Louis XIV silver spoon with which I can measure out the boiling water. But what a pain in the arse.

UPDATE: a couple of hours after guzzling his first breakfast, this is what Catorze did:

1. Requested a second breakfast.

2. Five minutes of parkour around the house, skidding on the floorboards like Bambi on ice (younger followers: ask your parents).

3. Escaped out at The Front.

4. Screamed bloody murder at the window for me to let him in, startling a dog walker in the park.

5. Third breakfast.

6. Rodent Duty in the snow. IN THE SNOW.

He’s fine, isn’t he?

It’s bloody freezing. He doesn’t care.

Rien n’a plus de valeur qu’aujourd’hui

~ iamthesunking ~ 29 Comments

Do you spend more time thinking about the future or the past? Why?

Whilst I can’t claim to see inside Louis Catorze’s mind, I’m fairly certain he can’t fathom the future. And, since he has the memory of a swatted gnat, I don’t suppose he reflects much on the past, either. The little sod is very much focused on what’s happening in the present. And, right now, he is doing what he does every morning: snoozing on my lap whilst I sip a cup of tea.

This is what we do every morning, before the world wakes up. I make the most of this time because, once Cat Daddy is up, it’ll be all about him and Catorze will drop me like a hot stone.

I like to think that Catorze enjoys this time, too. If, like now, we’re going through a cold snap*, sometimes he warms his tail on my cup of tea, like this:

Oolong tea is an excellent tail-warmer.

*Non-Brits: a cold snap in the UK means 1°C lower than it was the day before.

Starting every day like this doesn’t necessarily guarantee good things to follow, but it’s certainly the best start anyone could hope for. And, when I go to bed, I think about the future: specifically the next morning, and being able to do this all over again.

Entre le diable et la mer bleue profonde

~ iamthesunking ~ 30 Comments

Louis Catorze has barely budged from the living room recently. Every time we wonder whether he’s ill, we check on him and see that he’s perfectly fine. Then it dawned on Cat Daddy that his poor boy is probably taking refuge from the dreaded guitar.

Yes, Cat Daddy is still practising for several hours a day in the kitchen. And, yes, Catorze is still hating it with every grain of his being.

I came home from work the other night and was greeted by an incensed Catorze. The reason for his outrage? The cleaner was vacuuming, and Cat Daddy was playing the guitar. Yes, his two least favourite things in the world, in his Château, AT THE SAME TIME.

The little sod followed me upstairs and circled me as I changed my clothes, screaming absolute bloody murder. The only way of calming him down was to cuddle him on the bed and do his favourite thing: squeeze and rub his belly flesh quite firmly (sounds cruel but, trust me, he loves this).

By early evening I thought he would have recovered from his double-trauma. However, although he wasn’t angry anymore, he was alternating between creepy-staring and whimpering like a needy child, and I’m ashamed to say that I buckled under the pressure of his sinister intimidation-guilt combo. I took down the tree decorations with one hand whilst cradling Catorze over my shoulder, like a baby, with the other. It was just as absurd as it sounds and 986 times more difficult; unwinding lights from a tree whose Blood-Letting Needles of Death slash you with every movement is quite the Herculean labour even with two hands, let alone with one.

Anyway, our house is clean, the living room deYuled and Catorze back where he belongs, in his happy place. Cat Daddy, however, has a dead arm after having to watch television like this, which is a whole new way of being TUC:

Cat Daddy, don’t move a muscle!

Catorze loves his papa. But he still wishes he would stop playing the guitar.