Remember when Louis Catorze loved his new itchy cat treats?
Yeah, well, now he doesn’t.
The little sod ate the first couple with considerable enthusiasm, even though I’d just fed him, so I thought we were onto a winner. But it didn’t last. And, bizarrely, he doesn’t seem to have changed his mind about them; it’s more that he doesn’t notice them anymore. If I put them in front of him, he doesn’t see them.
I know. It’s weird.
Cutting up the treats makes them crumble to pieces and release much more of their aroma than they did when they were whole pieces. But this still isn’t enough for him to notice.
I then put some of the dust onto his fur in the hope that he would groom it off. He didn’t. So, as I drank my morning green tea and mentally prepared for the day, I was stuck with a gritty, meaty-smelling cat on my lap.
Blue the Smoke Bengal, who is also an itchy cat, is now the beneficiary of the treats, and he certainly won’t let them go to waste. So at least ONE cat in TW8 will be less itchy.
Here is Catorze’s powdery, pulsing belly. You’re welcome:
2031 is actually not THAT far away. It would make Sa Maj twenty-one in human years, which is pretty ancient yet not beyond possibility, especially since we never even expected him to live to ten. In fact, being part-vampire, part-alien and part-cryptid, age is probably a different concept on his planet and he will probably live forever.
By the time Le Roi turns one hundred, it’s possible that The Uprising will have taken place and cats will be ruling the world. And, if he could write to his future self, whom I imagine sitting atop a golden throne, watching what’s left of the planet smouldering in a pile of Mordor-esque embers, I am certain he would only have one thing to say:
Merci à Dieu: Louis Catorze’s course of ear drops is complete. And what fun it wasn’t.
Poor Catorze. I don’t suppose he knew what came over me when, one minute, he’d be snoozing peacefully on my lap and, the next, I was turning his ears inside-out and shoving stuff into them.
Warming the bottle of liquid first, which I had originally dismissed as a bratty indulgence, is very important; I discovered this the hard way when I accidentally let it go cold one time, and Catorze thrashed and writhed as if I’d poured acid into his ear.
On another occasion, he shook the liquid so hard out of his ear that I actually saw it fly across the room. And, of course, when I went to clean it up, there was no trace of it. No doubt I will find it by the time it’s corroded a hole wherever it landed (probably on something highly visible, ruinously expensive or both).
On a third occasion, he shook the liquid out of his ear again but this time it was much easier to know where it landed: my face.
Despite all this, the little sod never attempted to eviscerate me, despite the fact that he has the strength to do so. In fact, there were times when he was back on my lap and purring minutes afterwards. I like to think that, on some level, he understands that I do this for a reason, although the reality is that he probably just forgot.
Anyway, Catorze is through it, as are we – in fact, he hasn’t scratched his ears or shaken his head since I started the treatment. So it seems to be working.
Here he is, thanking Satan and all his demons below that the whole thing is now over:
Now he can’t pretend not to hear us when we call him.
When Jean-Paul Sartre said “Hell is other people”, he had obviously never put ear drops into the ears of a cat who really, really didn’t want them.
Sartre ought to have known better – after all, he had a cat (famously named “Rien”, French for “nothing”). Obviously Simone de Beauvoir was the one who took responsibility for the boring cat chores such as vet appointments and medication, whilst Sartre was the fun parent:
Fun! (Picture from facebook.com.)
On a somewhat related note, Albert Camus’s cat, Cigarette, looked so startlingly like Catorze that it’s actually chilling. Look at the teeny body, the manga eyes and the rear end in the air, all the while flirting with a man. This could even be a picture OF Catorze, non?
Teleporting, and now … time-travelling? (Picture from reddit.com.)
I watched two YouTube videos about how to give ear drops to cats but, in each case, the cats just sat there and let it happen. So they didn’t really help. Come on, vets and YouTubers: we want representation, please. In the same way that a tall, thin model aged twenty-five doesn’t demonstrate what clothes will look like on my body, a video of a compliant cat gives me no idea about how to medicate my own cat.
The first result was useless as it only showed good cats, not difficult ones. As for the second one, that ship left the port YEARS ago.
After warming the bottle, as per the instructions on the first video, I managed perhaps two drops in one ear and 0.01 drops in the other. It was impossible to know how much I was putting in, with the nozzle being inside Catorze’s ear, but this is an estimate based on, erm, random supposition. A second attempt, which yielded more liquid, was more successful although, again, was it overall too little, too much or the right amount? Who knows?
I tried to massage his ears afterwards, although that didn’t go brilliantly, either. The narrator of the first video said that the cat “might like this”. Erm, no.
The biggest surprise was that Catorze stayed with me and allowed the second attempt to happen, so quickly after the first. I then realised that Cat Daddy was in the kitchen, hammering out “House of the Rising Sun” on the dreaded guitar, so Sa Maj made no attempt to escape. It’s a sad day when a cat would rather sit with the person who just assaulted them with ear drops, than leave the room and risk being even a metre or two closer to the Discordant Instrument of Doom.
Anyway, at least we have a plan for Catorzian containment during future dosings: make sure that Cat Daddy is always playing the guitar in the place which is his exit route.
And the irony is that, perhaps, after the grey alien mank has cleared from his ears, the poor little sod may be able to hear the guitar better.
Moments before disaster struck and he was squirted with Aurizon.
Earlier this week, we took Louis Catorze to the vet for his steroid shot.
He has lost weight and is now down to 3.05kg, but this is quite normal for him at this time of year. However, rather more worrying has been his recent increased ear-scratching and head-shaking. And, when the vet stuck a cotton bud into his ear, she told us that she had “never seen gunge that colour [grey] before”.
Oh dear. Only Catorze could ooze freakish alien mank unknown to the world of science.
The vet called back a few days later to tell us that Catorze’s ears were “yeasty and waxy” with “ROS bacteria” (Reactive Oxygen Species, apparently – no idea what this means). Treatment will involve giving him ten drops (!) of ointment in each ear (!!) every day for a week (!!!!!!!).
Catorze doesn’t even like anything lightly brushing against his ears, so the thought of pulling them open and squirting liquid in doesn’t bear thinking about. Unlike the spot-on, where I’ve always got away with flinging the contents of the vial in Catorze’s direction and considering the job done if a few drops landed on him, with ear medication it’s pointless doing it half-arsèdly. There’s even a special way that you have to hold the ear when you’re doing it, otherwise the liquid just swishes around the outside and doesn’t go in.
The medicine, a product called Aurizon, sounds pretty severe. We have to monitor Catorze very closely and, if he displays any signs such as weird walking and head tilting, we’re to stop treatment and take him to the vet immediately.
Oh. Mon. Dieu.
Cat Daddy: “It might not be too bad. Wait till you try it.”
“You”?
Anyway, I have collected the ear drops from the vet, and I’m optimistically hoping that the little sod will sit for me as beautifully as this YouTube cat does for his human.
He won’t, will he?
Witchcraft and/or rum are the only things that will make this work.
I’m not quite sure what’s happening at the moment, but other cats seem to be the ones being complete shites whilst mine is behaving.
I repeat: OTHER CATS ARE BEING SHITES AND MINE IS BEHAVING.
Someone posted on our online neighbourhood forum, having found a discarded cat tracker in their garden. Apparently the wearer had been scrapping with the finder’s cat and, when the finder had gone out to break up the fight, the impinging miscreant had scarpered, leaving his ID behind.
An absolutely mortified lady replied that it belonged to her cat, and apologised for his behaviour. Others then replied to her comment with words to the effect of, “Of course it had to be your cat! Who else would it be?” I felt bad for her, but also relieved that there’s a cat out there who is much worse than Louis Catorze. And, as luck would have it, he’s a black cat, too. Apparently he’s “huge with a massive tail” which doesn’t sound at all like Catorze, but hopefully I can persuade the next eyewitness(es) that large cats can look small from certain angles.
There must be something in the London water at the moment, because the mamma of Chelsea-supporting tuxedo cat Boots had a similar experience recently. It was less public, but it made up for this in bucketloads with the level of embarrassment. One of her neighbours knocked at her door, asked if she had lost anything, then handed over a Chelsea cat collar which he’d found in his garden.
Don’t be fooled by the cute little white heart.
I don’t know which is worse: the whole neighbourhood knowing that your cat is a troublemaking scrapper, or one person seeing Chelsea cat merchandise and immediately knowing it must belong to you? I’m leaning more towards the latter.
Boots’ mamma tried to explain that she wasn’t actually a Chelsea fan and that it was all a bit of a joke, but then that’s what I’d say if I WERE a Chelsea fan. I don’t know that her neighbour was convinced.
Oh, and Catorze’s cat-cousin Roux brought in a bumble bee on Tuesday. If you really want to destroy the human race, what better way to go about it than to kill off the main animal that keeps us alive?
Roux is on the lookout for more bees.
Meanwhile, in a parallel universe somewhere, Catorze is behaving. In fact, when Cat Daddy was cursing Catorze for breaking into my sock drawer and pulling everything out, I had to admit that it was me who caused the mess when I couldn’t find my grey tights. (Cat-Disliking Friend’s advice was, “You should’ve just kept quiet and let the cat take the blame.”)
We’re not sure how to handle this course of events. And why are Catorze’s comrades creating all these diversions? Is something cataclysmic about to go down here at Le Château?
Usually, when Louis Catorze needs his next steroid shot, he will start scratching again, and this becomes more and more intense until we take him to the vet. The vet usually has plenty of availability, but occasionally we have had to wait. And, when the building housing the veterinary practice undergoes its long-awaited refurbishment, who knows how long we will have to wait? (In fact, who knows where we will even go?)
I recently had Nutri-Paw supplements pop up on my social media feed, and I decided to try out their itchiness and immunity treats, in the hope that it might make Catorze more comfortable between vet appointments. And, at £19.99 per pot (or a bit less, if we subscribe) versus £80 per steroid shot, it had to be worth a punt, non?
Yes to all of the above.
As we are all aware, Le Roi is a ludicrously fussy eater, and buying something that we WANT him to like is usually a guarantee that he won’t touch it. So I made sure that Blue the Smoke Bengal – who happily eats anything that isn’t nailed down – was on standby to receive the treats in the very likely event of them being rejected.
My plan was for these to feature in Catorze’s life as a Dreamies-type treat. Because I wanted him to like them but not love them so much that he refused his Orijen, I gave him one treat far away from his feeding station, in the hope that his silly brain would somehow register it as a different from his Orijen, rather than a replacement for it.
And, astonishingly, he ate one. Nobody was more surprised than I, that the biggest hurdle was cleared with such ease.
These will make the perfect snack for fending off the creepy staring, during those times when he acts hungry but we know that, if we go to his bowl and fill it, he will just sniff it and walk away.
However, despite being light as air, these things are too large to fit into the teeny-tiny Catorzian bouche, so I have to cut them in half. And they’re quite brittle and crumbly, so this is a messy task. I don’t mind it too much, but Cat Daddy will be swearing with every breath and turning the air blue with Unrepeatable Expletives if I ask him to do it. (That said, he swears about Catorze’s dandruffy fur, too, so he can’t have it both ways.)
Catorze has been looking rather scruffy of late and, when I brush him, rather than ridding his coat of dandruff, it seems to dredge up more. Let’s hope that I can manage the cutting in half, and have him looking glossy and chic in time for his birthday in two months’ time.
Oh, and let’s also hope they respond to my email to suggest, erm, a kitten version of the treat, suitable for little mouths.
Louis Catorze has been all over me lately, even, on a couple of occasions, choosing my lap over Cat Daddy’s. For a while I thought he was actually starting to like me, but then I realised that I am just the safe refuge from the dreaded guitar.
Yes, Cat Daddy is still at it with the Discordant Instrument of Doom. And, yes, Catorze still hates it. (Cat Daddy shouldn’t take this too personally, though; I was on my phone whilst Catorze was on my lap, and I accidentally clicked on a link whose twanging guitar soundtrack sent the poor little sod running for his life.)
However, just to confuse us, he is quite happy to sit for hours and listen to the likes of Jimmy Page blasting HIS guitar through the speakers. And he (Catorze, I mean, not Jimmy Page) has just climbed into Cat Daddy’s guitar case, thrashed around for a few minutes and then settled down for a nap.
He doesn’t come from the land of the ice and snow. The land of hellfire and brimstone, maybe.
My initial thought was that perhaps Catorze didn’t know that this was a guitar case, but he’s seen it plenty of times and has run away when Cat Daddy has reached for it to take out the guitar. Or perhaps he knew perfectly well what it was and was trying to assert himself over the Discordant Instrument of Doom and publicly declare that it wasn’t the boss of him (even though his reaction to its sound suggests otherwise)?
Louis Catorze doesn’t have a repertoire of drinks, and is only allowed water. Well, you’ve seen what he’s like on just water – would you really want to see him on absinthe shots or cask-strength whisky?
(Ok, I know that some of you would, just for the entertainment value. But, trust me, he would not be a force for good.)
You’d think all waters were created equal, but they’re not. Cats are weird when it comes to drinking, and there’s no logic to their thinking. (That wasn’t supposed to rhyme.)
Sa Maj likes his water from a tall glass, and it has to be either a highball/Collins glass, a wine glass or a pint glass. It’s a firm NON to a cocktail coupe, and don’t even bother serving him water in a bowl because he won’t drink it … and, if he has to go on thirst strike and shrivel up into a dry husk to prove this point, so be it. That said, there are days when he will leave his water glass untouched, preferring, instead, rainwater from the grimy surface of the outdoor table, or the murky, fly-infested depths of a bucket or watering can.
Nobody understands why.
Table water! Youpi!Bucket water! Youpi!
Catorze’s departed cat-cousin, Alfie, had similarly unconventional tastes, refusing both tap water and bottled water and only accepting liquid refreshment from the water butt in the alleyway, once it had started to turn green. The first time I saw the state of his water bowl (decanted from the alleyway water butt), I thought his human was perhaps a bit negligent. He wasn’t. This was the only way that Alfie would drink – and, given the choice, green water is (a bit) better than none at all.
Alfie lived to fifteen, so obviously green water didn’t do him any harm.
We can blame evolution for most of their oddities, but I would love to know what force compels them to favour gross water over fresh and crystal-clear; nothing about it makes any sense. But, for once, I can confidently say that it’s not just my cat who’s this weird, and I’m sure that there are others out there who are even worse.
Saint Jésus et tous ses anges: Louis Catorze is eating normally. Nobody understands why he’s conceded, but he has, and we will happily take it.
I am so glad I didn’t follow the stupid advice of my friends – YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE – who told me to just give him the Michelin-starred hot-smoked salmon. I have been determined to stay strong throughout this whole escapade, hearing Charles de Gaulle’s voice in my ear telling me not surrender under any circumstances. I wouldn’t object to giving him (Catorze, I mean, not Charles de Gaulle) the salmon if he were on his deathbed, but certainly not whilst he’s perfectly healthy and just taking the piss.
And now my efforts have paid off, because I just put his Orijen in his bowl and he eats it. I don’t even need to bother with the hot water anymore.
The question is: how long will this last? And will there be some new, unanticipated twist to this whole saga sometime later? Lobster bisque drizzled atop the Orijen, perhaps? Or hot scallop consommé misted over the Orijen from a diamond-encrusted atomiser?
A while ago I posted about Wisdom Panel, a DNA ancestry test for pets, and my surprise at its seemingly incongruous advertising slot in the middle of a Prime Video show about serial killers or some such thing.
Intelligent: nope. Easy to love: nope. Medium size: HELL, nope.
I have just seen another ad for it, this time during the half-time break of the football match between West Bromwich Albion and Southampton.
Once again, the placement seems ill-matched. Yet here I am, writing about it for a second time. Either this is a massive coincidence, or I happen to fit the very niche customer profile – football supporter from the south coast or the West Midlands, with deviant bloodlust – exceptionally well.
This time, the focus of the ad was less about us adjusting our care according to the test results, and more about giving the little sods a Get Out Of Jail Free card. “Juniper [a dog] has genetic markers which make her likely to overeat.”
Sure she does. Nice try, Juniper.
Maybe I should try a similar line on my neighbours when “It must have been some other black cat” starts to grow old?
“It’s not my fault he’s a massive shite. It’s his genetic markers!”
Anyway, Cat Daddy and I still aren’t tempted to part with our money, despite the fact that this brand seems hellbent on targeting us (and despite the 20% discount on offer on their site). I’m wondering, however, whether the Dog Family should have conducted a test on Oscar when he was still around, because, according to Wisdom Panel, a Yorkshire Terrier looks like this:
louiscatorze.com 