If there had to be one cat to take the concept even further, of course it would be Louis Catorze’s cat-cousin Rodan. Imagine a naughtier version of Catorze, with youth on his side and the benefit of a sidekick (his sister Mothra) to egg him on.
Yes, exactly.
Here is Rodan, relaxing on his human siblings’ Lego:
?????????????
No, we can’t understand why anyone would want to do this. Yet never, in the history of catdom, has that ever stopped them from doing silly things.
Can anyone explain this? [Silence, tumbleweed, crickets.]
Louis Catorze has the whiniest, most irritating voice on this earth. The problem with this is that, when he uses his voice – and he uses it A LOT – we have no idea whether he’s complaining or not.
Our visitors, upon hearing his screams, often take pity on him immediately, saying, “Aww, poor Louis! What’s the matter?” Erm, nothing. That’s just his normal voice.
I could post multiple examples of his work, but this video from some years ago was probably the most embarrassing (being out in public) and the loudest. And, no, nothing was wrong:
Louis Catorze gave us a massive scare a few nights ago.
I walked into the living room, where he was sound asleep, and he didn’t stir in the way that cats do when someone makes a noise during their nap. I called his name, even poked him in the body, all to no avail. I could see that the little sod was breathing, but he was utterly motionless.
I lifted his head up in my hand, and it lay in my palm like a weight. When I let him go, he flopped down, as if he were unconscious.
Oh. Mon. Dieu.
I called Cat Daddy, who was also quite alarmed when I demonstrated the heavy head thing again. Then, when Catorze heard his papa’s voice, somehow he snapped back from whatever parallel universe he was in, stirred gently and let out a breathy, fairylike squeak.
What just happened? And why on earth didn’t I video it, so that I would have something to show the vet if things turned to merde later? Perhaps it’s possible for cats to sleep so deeply that they’re unaware of any shouting and prodding going on, but this is nothing that I’ve ever seen before.
After the incident, Catorze was absolutely fine and acted as if nothing had happened. And, a day later, he was galloping around the house as if the devil were at his tail*, screaming absolute bloody murder. Nothing was wrong, and he didn’t want anything. This was just for fun.
*Not a wholly accurate comparison since the devil would probably run away from him, not vice versa, mais tant pis.
Please let me know if you have ever experienced this in a cat. (The deep sleep, I mean, not the racing around, screaming.)
“I love to lounge upon cushions, and think with raptures of my adorers.” (Balzac)
Remember when Louis Catorze wouldn’t eat a piece of fish unless it was mushed up into an insipid paste? Curiously, this seems to be a selective affliction only affecting cat food. If said piece of fish happens to be hot-smoked salmon skin, for instance, he’s fine.
I know. Imagine that!
We caught him out the other day when we were slicing up some hot-smoked salmon, and Catorze decided to bully us into sharing. Cat Daddy couldn’t be bothered to cut up the skin into tiny pieces, so he just dumped a couple of large strips into Catorze’s bowl.
The little sod dragged one out, sort of flipped it in the air and swallowed it whole, just like the T-Rex in the first Jurassic Park who snapped up the horrible lawyer who was sitting on the toilet. (Younger followers: ask your parents.)
So, to summarise:
Cat food: must be mushed up. No, that’s still too chunky. Maybe pass it through a sieve as the final stage, the way Marcus Wareing does for a chicken liver parfait?
Hot-smoked salmon skin: gulped down in one, irrespective of the size.
In fact, were it not for the cost, not to mention our fear of the little sod choking to death, we might be quite tempted to give him progressively larger pieces of hot-smoked salmon skin just to see how far he would take it. Would be swallow a piece the size of a hand? An A4 sheet of paper? His own body from ear to tail?
Fun fact: the biggest salmon ever caught was 97lbs. Catorze is around 6.2lbs.
Rodan and Mothra thoroughly enjoyed the festive season, when they were surrounded by people, and they have been feeling rather needy since everyone returned to their respective workplaces and schools.
Here they are, happily snuggled up in their human sister’s bed. But just look at Rodan, on her pillow:
Cheeky sod(s).
Now, did he see an opportunity when she rolled off the pillow, sneaking silently into position as soon as it was vacated? Or is it possible that he could have … SHOVED HER OFF? (I know, I know, a Chat Noir doing something so dastardly just to benefit themselves is utterly unthinkable, but we have to consider all options here.)
What do you think, Mesdames et Messieurs? Did Human Sister fall or was she pushed?
If you could make your pet understand one thing, what would it be?
Despite playing dumb, our cat understands plenty. WE are the ones who need help in understanding HIS stupid shit.
Cat Daddy and I don’t often have baths, because we much prefer showers. Yet, when I do have a bath, I have to wash it down prior to using it because it’s all bitty and hairy. A bathtub which is only ever used once every three weeks at the most, and which is cleaned weekly whether it’s used or not, shouldn’t be bitty and hairy, right?
I then realised that the hairs weren’t human hairs. Louis Catorze had been gadding about IN THE BATHTUB.
Why? It’s such a strange thing to do, especially as he has a zillion more comfortable places to be.
What does he do in there? Does he just go to sleep, or does he slide around like a teenager in a skate park?
When? He is always either with us or outside … unless he only goes into the bathtub when we’re not home, and jumps out again when we return (which is REALLY strange, yet probably still wouldn’t be the strangest thing about him)?
Catorze is the only one who could make this make sense, if he wanted to. However, he doesn’t.
An old photo of more bathroom misadventures. Here, he was getting high on the bleach after the bathroom had been cleaned.
After learning about some of the gross things that are in tap water – if you don’t know, trust me, you’re better off not knowing – I decided to treat myself to an eco water filter. It’s eco because, instead of throwing away a plastic filter cartridge every few weeks, you open the cartridge, empty out the coconut fibre charcoal innards and replace those. Not perfect, but not bad either.
I decided to buy this just for me, but I have to admit that I briefly dallied with the idea of giving Catorze filtered water, too. Now, please hear me out. It was only a thought and I’m not going to go through with it, for the following reasons:
1. If Catorze’s guts can handle rotting rat carcasses oozing with maggots, he is probably managing fine with tap water.
2. I would die of embarrassment telling a chat-sitteur to serve our cat filtered water in our absence, yet letting them help themselves from the minging tap for their own drinks.
3. If there were some sort of crisis in the future and we were forced to give Catorze tap water as an emergency measure, he would probably go on thirst strike and let himself shrivel up into a brittle, anhydrous husk, just to spite us.
So there will be no fancy water for Sa Maj. But don’t feel bad for him, because he still has a choice of delightful drinking spots available to him: his water glass, the rainwater that pools on the outdoor table and the indescribable stagnant muck lurking within the garden bucket.
Here he is, enjoying each one at various moments over the years:
Le royal wine glass, during the glorious days before Cat Daddy kicked it over and broke it.The outdoor bar.The cess pool of horrors.Bonus photo of Catorze’s cat-auntie, Zelva, drinking from the water that my mum leaves out for the foxes in an upcycled washing machine door. (She has her own cool, boiled water indoors.)
The last few weeks have been something of an experimental period, to try to establish a feeding routine for Louis Catorze now that he’s on wet food.
This is what I’ve discovered:
There is one variant which he doesn’t love quite as much as the others. Guess which it is? Clue: it’s the fish that started this whole thing off. (That’s right: despite turning into an absolute hell-beast when we’re preparing or eating salmon, when it’s in cat food he likes it but doesn’t LOVE it. )
I have to mush the fish flakes into an indescribable paste before Catorze will eat them. (Yup: he, who happily munches the heads off mice and rats, won’t eat a salmon flake if it’s more than 0.01cm².)
Catorze’s preferred serving size is not a whole pack, like a normal cat, nor even half a pack, but three-quarters of a pack, three times a day. Or maybe four times, depending on his mood. (Obviously if it’s four then that works out at three packs a day, which is fine. However, two and a quarter packs a day is just nonsense and doesn’t sit well with me psychologically.)
It’s a hard life being a Catorzian slave. Yet, I’m sure if you asked Catorze, he would tell you that this is only right and proper, and that all cats should be treated like this.
Cat Daddy: “There’s a black cat in the garden! Come and look!”
Me: “Where is it?”
Him: “Up there, behind the forsythia.”
Me: “That’s Louis.”
Him: “No, it’s not.”
Me: “It is! Look!”
Him: “Oh my God, he’s supposed to be getting old. What’s he doing up there?”
Oui, Mesdames et Messieurs: Louis Catorze’s post-steroid oomph has kicked in.
When he went for the injection last week there was the usual customary screaming on the journey and in the waiting room, with Catorze only shutting up when a huge greyhound started kicking off in the Dog Area. The vet receptionist told Catorze that he had “a very unique meow”, although we don’t think this was supposed to be a compliment.
Catorze has a new “lowest weight ever” to tell people about, and he now tips the scales at a mere 2.83kg. I was quite upset about this, although the vet wasn’t concerned; apparently, not only do old cats lose weight anyway, but they lose muscle mass in the winter due to sitting around and not doing much. Our good friends at The Cool Cat Club, whose food Catorze is still enjoying, confirmed this. So, although this makes us a little uneasy, everything that’s happening is normal (or as normal as can be for Catorze).
Now that he’s home, his post-steroid munchies have been activated and he’s eating, drinking, screaming and misbehaving. Hopefully, when spring arrives, he will start to chub up.
I follow Doug Thomas’s wonderful blog about his gorgeous cat Andy. Andy is a Persian with supposedly black fur, but he seems to reflect light differently every time he’s photographed and, as a result, he treats our eyes to a whole spectrum of glorious monochrome. He can go from Black Hole of Anti-Matter to Silverback Gorilla to Fifty Shades of Grey in the space of weeks, days or even hours.
Louis Catorze, on the other hand, just looks black, although he can mix it up a bit by sometimes offering us, erm, black with a coating of unidentified garden crud. He’s not the glossy, velvety panther that most Chats Noirs are, but that’s just our lot in life and we have to accept it.
At the end of last month I commented on one of Doug’s posts, in which Andy’s fur looked painted in oil pastel and delicately, painstakingly smudged by hand. Doug replied that the portrait setting on his camera happens to bring out this feature of Andy’s beautiful fur.
Stunning boy.
I have a portrait setting on my iPhone, too, yet it does the opposite to Catorze: rather than accentuating his soft edges, it slices them off entirely and sharpens his soft little face. Here are two pictures of him in the same pose, with and without the portrait setting, taken seconds apart, and you can see that he looks like two entirely different cats:
“Normal” Catorze.Glow-up Catorze.
Whilst I think he certainly looks sleeker and tidier in the second picture, sleek and tidy don’t scream “Catorze” to me (and have probably never been used in a sentence alongside his name). And seeing these images together has made me question all the photos I’ve ever taken of him using the portrait setting. Have I been misrepresenting him to the world? Have you all been catfished by Catorze?
I’d love to hear your opinions. Which photo do you prefer?
Jigsaw puzzles for cats? No, not ones that cats actually put together. Ones where they just lie on the pieces. Now, please hear me out.
We all know about cats and cardboard boxes. And some of us know about cats and newspapers. But cats and jigsaw puzzles? Perhaps Louis Catorze’s frère-from-another-mère, Antoine, and Antoine’s usurper stepbrother, Boots, might care to explain this one?
Antoine and Boots can’t resist lying on an in-progress jigsaw puzzle and preventing their maman, Lizzi, from progressing. Lizzi has even been known to construct barriers to protect her work, but to no avail. Boots, in particular, is so bullish and ungainly in his movements that he has been known to dislodge pieces, and it’s only a matter of time before one, other or both cats sit on the puzzle and end up with a piece stuck on their arse.
Boots is actually a Chelsea fan.Up the Gunners? Are you sure about that, Boots?Just make yourself comfortable.Ok.Not you as well, Antoine?His toes are still on the pieces.
Antoine and Boots have little in common in terms of personality, yet they both do this; it’s quite peculiar that two such dissimilar cats would both have the same quirk. They don’t even like one another, yet they seem to unite in their one common goal of annoying the merde out of their maman.
Do any of your cats do this? And can you offer any suggestions as to why, or will it forever remain another Cat Mystery?
The Met Office promised us Londoners an Arctic blast this week, and I’m disappointed – although not at all surprised – that we didn’t get one. Oh well. It can’t all be fun and games, like it is in the US.
I love snow, and the way in which it transforms everything it touches into a magical new world. I also love what a great backdrop it is for Chat Noir photography. Oui, Mesdames et Messieurs: the little sods are notoriously difficult to photograph in the wrong light, yet snow makes them look great. Yes, even the weird, misshapen little freaks of nature such as Louis Catorze.
Regretfully, because we humans have royally stuffed up the planet and our winters will only grow warmer, not colder, I don’t think I will ever take another snow photo of Catorze in his lifetime. Here is the only one that I have (I think), from 2019:
Zoom in for a tiny glimpse of the famous fangs.
I would love to see your snow portraits of your furry overlords/ladies. Please post them below in the comments, if you can.
Most people in the UK took down their Christmas decorations at the start of this week. However, our tree is still up because it’s not being collected from the rental company until Sunday; somehow it seems silly to take off all the decorations and just leave a bare tree in the living room for a week.
Rodan helps with the putting-away.
Cat Daddy: “But it’s bad luck to keep decorations up. Look at what happened last year.”
Erm, except that, last year, we took them down on the correct day. If we can have such a shit circus of a year despite playing by the rules, I can’t imagine things getting much worse if we don’t. Plus we do fate-tempting things all the time in this house, such as spilling salt, breaking mirrors and having a black cat cross our path repeatedly, multiple times a day.
I guess only time will tell whether the bad luck catches up with us at some point.
Or maybe, just maybe, Louis Catorze is it?
Make yourself comfortable on MY special post-operative pillow. I’ll just contort my body around you like a broken pretzel.
louiscatorze.com 