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Our plan to keep Louis Catorze Côned for twenty-four hours hit a slight bump in the road when Cat Daddy and I realised that we would both be out of the house all day on Wednesday. 

Catorze is fearless, even when Côned, and has no hesitation in doing all the things guaranteed to kill him – scaling fences, wandering unaccompanied through fox-infested areas, hurling himself onto white-hot barbecue griddles, that kind of thing – but he struggles to do the sensible things that actually keep him alive. And we feared that, without adequate supervision, he would put even more effort into the dangerous things and far less into the necessary ones. 

(Despite not living with him, you know this too, non?)

Côned Catorze manages to eat from his raised bowl, but he’s not able to do that weird feline thing of extracting one scrap of food and consuming it away from the rest, to see if I’m trying to poison him (you know the thing I mean). And, if he can’t conduct the Cyanide Test, he probably won’t eat the food. 

Catorze also isn’t able to enter or exit the cat flap when Côned. We don’t have a litter tray for him and, even if we did, I’m not convinced that he would use it; he wasn’t a fan of it when he was Côned for months during lockdown. Cat Daddy had the genius idea of just leaving him to toilette willy-nilly “because the cleaning lady could clean it up”, but, quite frankly, poor Elena has enough to handle with the cacophonous screamathons delivered to her by Catorze every week. Subjecting her to his toilettes, as well as the screaming, would just be beyond the pale. 

So we didn’t have much option, really. We would have to either leave the back door open all day (which solved the toilettes problem, but not the eating and drinking one) or unCône Catorze early. 

We went for the latter. 

Anyway, I sped home yesterday evening, anxious about whether Catorze would even still be together by the time I arrived back, or whether he would just be a mangled mass of screaming flesh. But, luckily, all was as normal as can possibly be expected in this household. Let’s hope that he continues to do the right thing by letting himself heal.

Here he is, scowling at me for interrupting his alfresco nap: 

For more Catorzian capers, please visit http://louiscatorze.com