louiscatorze.com

Je crie, donc je suis

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Sa Majesté Louis Catorze, Le Roi Soleil, supreme ruler of Le Château, sworn enemy of canine foe and scourge of Ocado delivery drivers.

  • Clouer ses couleurs au mât (Partie 3)

    What personal belongings do you hold most dear?

    If you were to ask Boots, I bet he wouldn’t say “collars”.

    Anyone who knows about cats will, most likely, know about the Cat Distribution System. This is the idea that, when the planets are aligned in a particular way, the universe will send you a cat. Mind you, I’d like to know what was going on when it sent us Louis Catorze; was it a dark moon alongside Mercury Retrograde with Beelzebub Rising? Someone certainly has some explaining to do. 

    Anyway, it has come to my attention that, as well as a Cat Distribution System, there may also be a Collar Distribution System. 

    After Boots’ last collar disaster – it seems we ordered a dog one by mistake – we had to resume our search for a new supply for him. (Oui, Mesdames et Messieurs: the big sod has managed to lose nine, or maybe 187 – we’ve lost count – Chelsea collars, in and around the CR4 area.)

    “Whatever. Another one will turn up.”

    However, just as Boots donned the very last collar of his collection, That Neighbour* posted one through his letterbox, after finding it randomly lying around and knowing that it belonged to Boots. Then, when Boots’ mamma bumped into That same Neighbour in town, he mentioned that he’d just found another one and had posted that through, too. 

    A just-posted Chelsea collar, lying on the doormat of Maison Boots.

    *Not the TW8 That Neighbour, who escorts Catorze home when he escapes. There is also a CR4 That Neighbour, the one who always happens to find Boots’ discarded Chelsea collars around the neighbourhood. Yes, it’s the same person every time. And he happens to be a Chelsea fan, too, 

    Regretfully, the bell is missing from one of the collars, and the bell is all-important for warning Chat Noir Antoine of the presence of his usurper stepbrother. But, that aside, the Collar Distribution System appears to be working. Whenever Boots is in need, just at the point where his mamma thinks it’s time to buy more collars AGAIN, one appears. 

    So Boots has recovered two of his lost Chelsea collars, and he’s just taken a delivery of some new, properly-fitting Crystal Palace ones, too, in the very likely event that he loses those two. And now all is well with the universe. 

    Was Boots the FA Cup lucky mascot?

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

  • Un nouveau mode de vie (Partie 6) 

    Miraculously, Louis Catorze has not scratched his wound and it’s healing nicely. I don’t know whether this means the stars are aligned in some magical way or the apocalypse is just around the corner but, frankly, I’d even take the latter if it meant not having to Cône him anymore. 

    His eye area, although no longer bleeding, is still bald and shows his freakish paper-white skin. It looks just like the eyebrow tattoo of a gang member on Death Row: 

    Catorze is the one on the left. (The other guy’s photo is from pinterest.com and he may or may not be a gang member or on Death Row.)

    Meanwhile, his thyroid medication is supposed to get easier, right? Well, it doesn’t. 

    Sometimes, very rarely, it goes smoothly. I glove up, apply the gel to one finger, then Louis Catorze approaches me and I grab and swipe in a seamless movement. 

    The key seems to be that the little sod approaches me. If ever I’m the one having to seek him out – for instance, if I need to get the job done so that I can go to bed – that’s when the bother starts. Despite being thicker than a concrete milkshake, the sight of me heading towards him with a suspiciously scrunched-up fist makes him rightly wary, and then he’s off. 

    I had a failed mission last night when I managed to grab the little sod but he wriggled free and escaped. Any further approaches, even the ones in which I tried to Act Normal and pretend I was doing something else, were met with mistrust, and he kept scampering just out of my reach. Eventually he jumped over the fence and into That Neighbour’s garden, where he knew perfectly well that I wouldn’t follow. 

    As I say to my students: “All you can do is your best.” Even if your best is a bit shit.

    (I don’t tell them that last bit). 

    Pouncing whilst he sleeps is usually a good move.

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

  • L’équilibre travail-vie personnelle 

    How do you balance work and home life?

    Luckily my work as a secondary school teacher acts as respite from being bullied/gaslit at home by a psychotic black cat.

    Were it not for being able to escape a few days a week and spend time with angst-ridden teenagers, I’d probably be sectioned or dead. 

    Monday can’t come soon enough.

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

  • Clouer ses couleurs au mât (Partie 2)

    The votes have been verified and counted, and I can now reveal that there is a tie for the choice of Boots’ new collar: 

    Trust me, it was a tie. Hear me out (below).

    I know that the above chart shows the St George’s Cross to be the winner. However, I took this screen shot before I set the poll to “one vote per computer”, when the only way I could view the results was to vote for a second time. So, if we remove the illegal surplus ballot paper that I cast, we have a tie between Crystal Palace and the St George’s cross. 

    The solution, it seems, is to provide Boots with a supply of each but, in the time that has elapsed between researching the available collars and conducting the poll, there are no more St George’s cross cat collars available in the UK. 

    There are plenty of dog collars. However, they don’t have the safety mechanism required should the cat end up in a fix. (And Boots is a gadder-about, so he would really, really need this.)

    So, for now, here is the large sod in his new, personalised Crystal Palace collar:

    Oh dear.
    Goodness me.
    No.

    I think it might be a bit big (ahem), so Boots’ mamma plans to display this one rather than have him wear it (although it could work as a belt?).

    And it’s back to the drawing board to find a properly-fitting collar for Boots …

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

  • Le départ du Cône 

    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?)

    This is the kind of thing we’d sooner avoid.

    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: 

    And the same to you!

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

  • Le retour du Cône

    I’m starting to wonder whether we should just give black cats one Cône to share between them because, as soon as one of them stops needing it, a different one does something stupid. If it’s not one, it’s another. Bastards, the lot of them. 

    Cat Daddy and I went away on Friday, to different places, for two nights. And, naturellement, a couple of hours before we were due to depart for our respective weekend breaks, Louis Catorze decided to rock up looking like this: 

    Oh no.

    Obviously it was too late to find a live-in chat-sitteur or to set House Arrest plans in motion, so we had no option but to leave him to it and pray that he wouldn’t make it any worse. Neither we, nor Blue the Smoke Bengal’s mamma (who was feeding him), could do anything about it. When we returned home and discovered that God had forsaken us, we booked an appointment to see the vet.  

    Luckily the vet thought the facial injuries were only superficial. However, we have had to deploy Le Cône to prevent him from scratching his face any further, until the steroid starts to work its magic. This will be fine if it really is just for the prescribed one day, but I have horrible memories of lockdown when “just a day or two” turned into a couple of months. 

    But at least Catorze has chubbed up to a whopping 2.92kg. So there’s that silver lining among all this fire and brimstone. 

    Anyway, at the time of writing this, he is laying his vengeance upon us in the worst possible way: constant attempts to escape the garden over the fence, accompanied by gut-wrenching screaming, on an evening when all the neighbours are outside (and I think Family Next Door may even be entertaining guests). And, when Catorze discovered that Cat Daddy had bricked up his exit into the Zone Libre, the screaming worsened.

    No, we don’t know how he got up here.
    Poor Catorze.

    Repeat after me: “It’s only for one day … it’s only for one day …”

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

  • Vivre la vie folle

    What does freedom mean to you?

    Maybe Rodan would like to answer this? Or Louis Catorze? Or any cat who has had to spend time in Le dreaded Cône?

    After healing up nicely since sustaining injuries from a fight, Rodan was released from Le Cône. However, immediately upon release, the silly sod scratched himself up again – yes, AGAIN – so Le Cône was put straight back on once more. 

    Now, you’d think there were only limited gaddings-about to be had by a Côned cat. However, we know the full story from when Catorze was supposed to be Côned for a few days during lockdown but, because he wouldn’t stop scratching at his wounds, it ended up being a few months. If you let the little sods out whilst Côned (as we did), astonishingly, the reduced peripheral vision doesn’t hold them back. They still do the same moronic things that they did sans Cône, and probably a few more that didn’t occur to us. 

    And, if said moronic things are in public and in broad daylight, Le Cône makes it a little more difficult to say, “It must have been some other black cat”. (We still tried it. I don’t think our neighbours believed us.)

    Here is just a taste of what Rodan got up to, egged on by his sister Mothra: 

    A sunset wander.
    Mothra and Rodan do not live in either of these houses.
    This was sent to my sister by one of her neighbours.

    As the saying goes, “You can put a Chat Noir in a Cône, but you can’t make him behave.”

    *UPDATE: Rodan is now sans Cône, having miraculously stopped scratching during a brief Cône-free trial. How long will he last this time? 

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

  • L’intelligence artificielle ne fait pas de poids à la stupidité naturelle

    With which public figure do you disagree the most?

    Much as it pains me to claim that I know better than an eminent scientist, I don’t share Stephen Hawking’s view that Artificial Intelligence could pose a threat to us.

    Not long ago, when we were watching television, Louis Catorze stepped on the smart remote’s microphone and whined. Not a full-on scream, but his awful, plaintive, dying dog whine, which is actually a lot worse.

    The TV replied, “Sorry, can you say that again?”

    Six seconds ago, the front paws were on top of it.

    That tells us all that we need to know, doesn’t it?

    There is no way that any entity or force stupid enough to request a second Catorzian whine (trust me, even one is too many), would also be clever enough to take over the world. 

    Mesdames et Messieurs, humanity is safe. As you were. 

    Nothing artificial here. Not much intelligence, either.

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

  • D’où venait-il? Que signifiait-il? Où l’appréhender?

    What was the last live performance you saw?

    It’s funny you should ask, WordPress, because it took place just last night. And what a performance it was. 

    In the same way that nature abhors a vacuum, Louis Catorze cannot abide a closed door.

    Cat Daddy had an online meeting yesterday evening, with a local business for whom he is on the Board of Trustees. He shut himself in the living room in order to conduct this meeting which, naturellement, triggered Catorze’s Urge To Mess Things Up switch. The little sod appeared from wherever he was in the garden, stationed himself outside the closed door and screamed and screamed. 

    I was trying to watch the football and make madeleines as a farewell gift for my Year 11 students, whose last French lesson is today. I wasn’t really concentrating on what Catorze was doing … until it suddenly dawned on me that he had been screaming non-stop for twenty minutes. 

    I wondered if, perhaps, he was thirsty, so I let him into the front room. Within seconds, the door opened again and an angry hand flicked him back out again. Cat Daddy told me later that Catorze hadn’t even approached his water; instead, he had just circled the coffee table, screaming bloody murder, then jumped onto his lap to scream some more, into the camera.

    None of the meeting attendees said a word about it, and all continued as if nothing had happened.

    After a further few minutes, Catorze came to the kitchen to have a snack. I had hoped he’d tired of his screaming but, no, the snack was just to fuel himself for more. Then back he went, and the screaming resumed. 

    There wasn’t much I could do about this. Because our ground floor is quite open plan, there was nowhere that I could detain Catorze (unless I put him in the dining room, which was too high-risk with fragile glassware, containers of kombucha brewing, and so on). Plus surely not even he would have the energy or the inclination to scream all the way through until the end of the call? 

    He did. And, once the call was over, he no longer wanted to go into that room. 

    Here is just a small taste of what we had to endure that evening, for THIRTY MINUTES: 

    Cat Daddy, much later: “Louis, you were an absolute disgrace.”

    Catorze: “Mwah!”

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

  • Un nouveau mode de vie (Partie 5)

    My Catorzian thyroid-medicating skills have improved. And by “improved” I mean I’m about 0.03% less shit than I was when I did the first one. 

    Applying ear gel to a cat who doesn’t want ear gel is no mean feat, nor is it the kind of thing you can just do when the moment takes you. You have to lay out all the required apparatus ahead of time, but silently, without the cat noticing; if you go arsing about conspicuously in cupboards or drawers when the cat is within eye- and earshot, the little sod will know that something is afoot and will absent themselves as a precaution. 

    One of the best pieces of advice I received – thank you, Janet, if you’re reading this – was to only put on one finger of the glove, leaving the rest of it kind of scrunched up in your hand. This means that the cat is less likely to know what’s coming, on account of the glove being mostly concealed. I find that it works best to apply the gel to the gloved finger, then Act Normal and pretend to be engrossed in random other stuff before pouncing. This has yielded more success than grabbing and holding Catorze and making an “event” of it. A drive-by gangland shooting rather than a state-endorsed guillotining, if you will. 

    I can’t believe that this is the new normal for us. But, as ever, we Cat People smile and accept or unquestioningly, like the suckers that we are. 

    Must Act Normal … must Act Normal.

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

  • La Quinceañera del Rey Sol (Parte 2) 

    It’s Bank Holiday Monday, and we are still basking in the afterglow of Louis Catorze’s Quinceañera (which Cat Daddy keeps pronouncing as “quince-a-rama”, like Bananarama but with, erm, a quince instead of a banana). 

    The dress code was, “Cats messing stuff up”. I think I nailed it.

    The final guest list was as follows:

    • The Dog Family 
    • Cocoa the babysit cat and his sister Chanel’s folks 
    • Family Next door 
    • That Neighbour* and his wife
    • Blue the Smoke Bengal’s mamma 

    *That Neighbour is so called because he is always the one who ends up escorting Catorze home after he escapes out at The Front and goes on the rampage. When telling the story I always finish with, “And guess who it was that brought him home?” And the person listening says, “Oh no, not that neighbour again?”

    There was food (nachos with refried bean and tomato salsa dips, chicken enchiladas with salad and guacamole, lime and salted pretzel baked cheesecake and a Spanish cheese board) and drink aplenty, an outdoor mood board of some of our favourite Catorzian moments, Latin American music and general merriment, from 2:30pm until past 9pm. 

    Me: “We could call them meowgaritas!” Cat Daddy, without looking up from his phone: “No.”

    Catorze’s guests even brought him birthday cards: 

    The one on the far right is a BESPOKE DESIGN.

    Throughout it all, the birthday boy cordially greeted his guests, let the kids cuddle him, but mainly observed the proceedings from the other end of the garden, as if the whole thing were a bit too downmarket for him. He did, however, make sure that his late afternoon visite aux toilettes was timed perfectly to coincide with the serving of our main course. Yes, someone took a picture. No, I won’t be publishing it here. 

    We were too busy having fun to take many photos, but here are a couple from the day. We are so grateful to everyone who came although, now, we need to think about if and how we should go bigger and better for Catorze’s Sweet Sixteen next year …

    The full display.
    Catorze: “The hell is this mess?”
    Gazing at his favourite human.

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

  • Tu as un ami en moi 

    Thank you so much to everyone who sent birthday wishes to Louis Catorze, and special thanks to whoever sent him this, which he loved:

    I did allow him a bit of this as it’s a cat treat, not human food.

    The little sod had a splendid time out all night, then waking me up at 5am, just for fun. His Quinceañera will take place tomorrow, and I will update you next week on how that went.

    Remember those glorious days when Catorze would come to bed with me, and we would lie together in the light of my red lamp? Ah, what lovely memories. And, sadly, that’s all they are, because he doesn’t do it anymore. 

    Mesdames et Messieurs, please reset your watches because Catorzian Summer Time (CST) is officially here, and this means that the little sod is permanently out. We never see him. In fact, he doesn’t even attend Boys’ Club anymore, much to Cat Daddy’s relief disappointment. 

    And either the Beltane trickster gods are playing some sort of joke on us, or Armageddon is nigh: Louis Catorze and Blue the Smoke Bengal appear to have reached some kind of truce:

    Well, well, well.

    Relations between the two have always been somewhat mixed, with Blue being perfectly cordial and friendly and Catorze being the miserable shit who didn’t want to give him a chance. Catorze let the side down in spectacular fashion on this occasion, with the whole street watching. 

    However, perhaps Catorze’s icy heart is melting in his old age as, today, he was more than happy to welcome his friend. It was nice of Blue to pop round and say hello, although I happen know that his mamma was away for the day so he was probably just bored. 

    The rendez-vous didn’t last long, with Blue preferring to gaze over the fence into the Zone Libre than to interact with Catorze. But it’s good news that they are, at least, coexisting happily.

    I wonder if Blue will come to tomorrow’s Quinceañera?

    Too busy hanging out with friends to come and see us.

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

  • Je ne suis pas un psychopathe; je suis un sociopathe de haut niveau


    Do you have a quote by which you live your life, or of which you often think?


    (Sorry, WordPress, but the original wording bothered me.) 

    Being pagans at heart, Cat Daddy and I rather like the Wiccan saying, “If you do no harm, do what you will”. 

    Louis Catorze lives his life by the second part of the saying, i.e. just doing whatever the heck he wants. That’s not to say he SEEKS to do harm but, rather, that he is unconcerned about whether or not harm happens as a result of his actions. A sociopath rather than a psychopath, if you will. 

    (That’s correct, isn’t it? A psychopath intends to hurt others, whereas a sociopath merely doesn’t care about whether they do or they don’t? That said, both are pretty shit. Given the choice we wouldn’t really want to live with either one, and yet here we are.)

    Here is one of my favourite photos of Catorze, which truly sums up his “Do what you will” attitude: 

    Loving himself.

    His second-favourite motto, incidentally, is an adaptation of Murphy’s Law, “If it can go wrong, it will … and, if it doesn’t, I’ll give it a helping hand”. And clearly Le whole Blog is a testament to that. 

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

  • La Quinceañera del Rey Sol

    Louis Catorze is fifteen today, putting him in the unglamorous yet hilarious “Geriatric” category:

    Some sources call it “Super Senior”, but “Geriatric” is much funnier.

    I was a little sad when I read that treating his hyperthyroidism would buy him another three to five years, because that really didn’t sound like much time. Then I remembered that he’s fifteen now so, in actual fact, that gives him a very long lifespan indeed. And, since he’s part-alien in origin, it wouldn’t surprise me if he even exceeded that.

    Because it’s not often that a sickly scrap of a thing like Catorze turns fifteen, Cat Daddy and I will be celebrating this occasion belatedly, at the weekend, with, erm, a Quinceañera party. (We’re going for a Latin American theme, gracias for asking). It’s turning into quite a thing with the guest list currently at fourteen, although some haven’t yet confirmed attendance (I imagine because they think we’re joking).

    Sadly Catorze is not allowed jambon de Bayonne or jamón ibérico, but we are making up for this in cuddles. I think he’d rather have had the jambon/jamón, but never mind.

    Happy birthday, little sod. Let’s get your party preparations under way!

    Those are were my clean clothes.

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