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.
louiscatorze.com 
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