I have just had to eat my dinner* with my plate balanced on my left knee, and with my right leg repeatedly kicking away a screaming cat.
*It was chicken fajitas topped with sour cream and cheese, merci for asking.
Every time I kicked, he came back for more. Despite only being the size of Chucky, Louis Catorze had the resilience of Michael Myers, the guile of Hannibal Lecter and the volume of, erm, Leatherface’s chainsaw.
Naturellement, because I wanted the torment to be over, I bolted down my dinner as quickly as possible, and was finished long before Cat Daddy. Catorze then settled on my lap and left his papa to finish his meal in peace. The little sod didn’t utter so much as a squeak.
Me: “Why isn’t he screaming at you?”
Cat Daddy: “Because this is MY dinner. He only wants YOUR food, because you’re the one who gave him salmon off YOUR plate.”
One of my friends has just been over for our annual cemetery visit and horror fest. (I’m not joking: this is actually what we do together, every October, and it’s become a much-loved tradition.)
Because she has chat-sat Louis Catorze in the past, he knows her well and loves her visits, so I fully expected him to show off in front of her. But I didn’t think things would take THIS kind of turn, despite the fact that embarrassing behaviour is quite the Catorzian trademark.
Obviously there was the usual screaming. But, when we settled down to watch the first of our horror films, the little sod jumped up onto the coffee table where my friend was resting her feet, and deployed that all-too-familiar Hork Hork sound, along with accompanying funky chicken head movements pointed straight at her feet.
I was just about to tell her not to be concerned because Catorze often Hork Horks, only for it to be a false alarm. Fortunately, however, my friend was blessed with more foresight than I and chose to move her feet away. Just as she did so, the little sod puked all over the coffee table and on the ruinously-expensive Harris tweed cushion upon which he was perched, RIGHT IN FRONT OF OUR GUEST.
My friend is a cat person so she wasn’t fazed by this in the slightest, despite the fact that Catorze had been aiming for her feet and had done everything possible to give her a ringside seat for this horror show. I, however, want to take a walk into a wooded area and die of embarrassment. Imagine the shame of your cat trying deliberately to puke on your friend’s feet … and being incompetent enough to miss.
Cat Daddy: “That’s it: we’re never having friends round again. Or we’re rehoming him. One or the other.”
I’ll let you know when he’s decided which option he’s chosen.
*WARNING: CONTAINS TALK OF DEATH AND GENERAL CREEPINESS.*
A few days ago, Cat Daddy was watching television in the kitchen when Louis Catorze raced past him and clattered out through the cat flap. It turned out that there was a much larger (but then all cats are much larger than Catorze) tuxedo cat in the garden, and Sa Maj wasn’t happy about this. After staring at each other for a few seconds, the impinger turned tail and ran.
The weird thing was that Catorze hadn’t been sitting with Cat Daddy in the kitchen, so he couldn’t possibly have seen the impinger. In fact, not even Cat Daddy, with the higher eye line, had been able to see him without standing up. Catorze had run from the direction of the living room at the front of the house so, somehow, all the way from there, he had sensed that the perimeters of his Château had been breached.
We’ve had two cars since we’ve lived with Catorze, and he knew the sound of each. He even knows the sound of Cat Daddy’s KEYS.
I think that this heightened sense of creepy kitty sixth sense, not to mention his extra sensitivity to the full moon, would make him an ideal cadaver cat – if, indeed, he would agree to work for a living.
If, like me, you watch so many serial killer films and documentaries that the police would have something to say about your Prime Video account, you will know about cadaver DOGS. These clever doggies are used to sniff out whether a dead body has been in a particular place, and they are so good at their job that they can detect this both from surfaces and from the air.
In the US, they don’t even call them “dogs”; they call them “K9 officers”. I guess “K9 officer number 283” sounds better than “Woofy Boi-Boi” when it comes to writing up reports of what happened.
My thoughts naturally turned to whether cadaver cats could ever be a thing – after all, they are just as perceptive as dogs. I think Catorze would be an excellent cadaver cat; all those big, strapping policemen to cuddle, plus sniffing out death is right up his rue.
But how he might tell us of the presence of a body?
Would he creepy-stare at us? Or at the spot itself, as if looking at a ghost? And could we rely on him to only do the creepy death-stare when there was a genuine need, and not at random, inopportune moments just to freak us out?
If you are too scared to know what The Sign might look like, look away now.
“How will we know if he’s found anything? OH. RIGHT.”
A few nights ago, I had to turf a very indignant Louis Catorze off my lap to answer the door. It was a lady that I’d never seen before.
Lady: “Hello, I live at number sixty-three [or whatever number it was – I was so mortified at being caught out in my pyjamas at 8pm that I missed some of the detail]. I don’t suppose you’re missing a cat, are you?”
My brain: “Oh shit. What’s he done this time.”
My mouth: “No, I’m not. My cat’s right here.”
I pointed down to the space on the floor where Catorze would ordinarily be, in the event of someone knocking at the door. Naturellement, the one time that I actually wanted him to appear, he didn’t. Yet somehow I refrained from dragging the lady into the house, screaming, “See? It must have been some other black cat! You can’t prove anything!”
Lady again: “It’s a white Persian cat, with a name tag that says “Betty”. She has a phone number on her collar but the last few numbers have rubbed off.”
My brain: “THANK GOD.”
My mouth: “No, that’s not my cat. But she lives in the third or fourth house from the end of the street, the one with the blue door. And her Cat Daddy is called [name of neighbour who lives with Betty].”
Cat Daddy: “You could put her picture next to Louis’s and ask your followers to vote for the prettiest.” Erm, no thanks.
That is the scary thing about us cat freaks, Mesdames et Messieurs: we may never have spoken to you and you may not even know who we are but, if you have a cat, we know your name and where you live. Our subversive network spreads deep and wide, like the French Resistance during World War II.
Catorze and Betty have never crossed paths – at least, not when we’ve been watching him. When he’s alone and unsupervised out at The Front, who knows what he does? But, as he has a dislike of long-haired cats, I don’t imagine the encounter would go well, plus Betty is something of a bruiser, having been witnessed fighting with Catus Interruptus on one occasion.
That said, it would be quite funny to see two such diametrically-opposed cats facing off: an angelic white Persian with a pink diamanté collar, and a scraggy, black devil-cat with fangs.
What a good thing it is that we have the AI Bot, to turn our visions into almost-reality:
Discovery Plus, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
One of those ways is Ghost Town Terror, a series about a family who buy an abandoned pioneer ranch in Montana. They find a mummified cat in the crawl space under one of the buildings and, from that moment onwards, in addition to the human apparitions and voices that they were already experiencing, they are plagued by the sounds of feline hissing. So they are forced to call in the paranormal investigators.
The investigators’ research revealed the following information, which I quote word for word:
“In Irish folklore there’s something called a Cat Sidhe which is believed to be a type of demon who takes the form of a black cat. And it’s thought to steal souls.”
Well, this doesn’t sound too promising. Let’s hope the cat doesn’t also have fangs, because OH MY GOODNESS, WOULDN’T YOU KNOW IT:
A black, fanged, demonic cat. Imagine that.
“Shocked but not surprised” probably ought to be the inscription on my tombstone.
You’ve always known that Louis Catorze is a creepy little sod.
However, I’m about to show you an example of kitty creepiness that is common among all of them. ALL OF THEM. They may not always demonstrate it but it’s there, lying dormant until it suddenly breaks through the surface at a moment when you are home alone and feeling especially jumpy.
This is what Catorze’s ears look like when he’s sleeping normally. The Catorzian default/baseline position, if you will:
Nothing to see here …
And this is what they looked like sometime later, when Cat Daddy arrived home and was parking the car:
But plenty to hear, apparently.
Cat Daddy, later: “But I parked on the other side of the road. He can’t have heard or known.”
Oh, but he did.
Does your cat ever greet you when you walk through the front door, having seemingly arrived there in suspiciously quick time? If so, they knew that you were coming long before your key went into your door. They’re all at it.
He heard his daddy coming back long before I did.
I know: it’s creepy as hell. But, since they’re in our houses and won’t be moving out anytime soon, what can we do about it?
Bonus photo of Catorze’s cat-auntie Zelva, who can differentiate between sets of KEYS. She runs to either the back door or the front, depending on which keys she hears my mum pick up.
Which topics would you like to be more informed about?
Our vet recently posted this on social media, and I want to know more:
Clearly there was An Incident that triggered this post, and I am overjoyed to be able to say, with absolute sincerity, that it was nothing to do with my cat this time. But who was it? And what happened?
Was the guilty party a leadless dog or a carrierless cat? One of each? Or even a dog, a cat and a marauding, psychotic hamster? I am now eyeing every dog-walker, and every random cat that I see, with suspicion. (Not so much hamsters, as we don’t tend to see that many out and about in TW8.)
Would it be too much to ask* the vet for names? Or, better yet, for a short clip of the waiting room CCTV?
*I, erm, have already asked for both of the above. They haven’t replied.
I suspect that Louis Catorze knows something. But he ain’t telling.
An aborted attempt at seizing my lamb and olive stew.
Saint Jésus, Marie et Joseph, et le petit âne: Louis Catorze just went for a piece of smoked Comté on our cheese board, RIGHT IN FRONT OF US. Furthermore I’m ashamed to admit that this happened right in front of Cat Daddy and me, and we were too slow to stop it.
No, we weren’t drunk. Well, ok, Cat Daddy was a bit, but I had no excuse. We were so deeply engrossed in the television that it took us a good ten seconds to notice that we were under attack. Ten seconds may not sound like long, but it was plenty of time for Catorze to lick the slab of cheese all over.
Cat Daddy: “Louis! Oh my God, what a ****!”
He grabbed Catorze, plucked him off the cheese board with one hand like one of those fairground claw machines, then took a knife and cut away what he believed to be the cat-spitty area of cheese.
I told him there was no way on earth of knowing which bits were cat-spitty and which weren’t, so we might as well throw the whole lot away. Cat Daddy then tossed the cut-away piece of cheese to Catorze, who, having established that he had ruined it for us, decided that his work was done and that he no longer wanted it.
What is happening? What evil force is making my once-unmotivated-by-food cat suddenly turn into such a scavenging shite?
Here he is, feigning innocence and pretending to be a nice cat who doesn’t steal food. We all know the truth.
When Cat Daddy and I went to Scotland, we bought this piece of art:
My lovely horse.
It’s a kelpie, which is a mythical, water-dwelling ghost horse, rumoured to lure unwary people to a watery death. Not very pleasant, I know, but there are worse animals who do worse things to people. Don’t ask me how I know this.
The piece is made completely from upcycled materials; the frame is made of wood, and the kelpie and the sea foam are a thin sheet of metal shaded with coffee powder (yes, really). When we bought it, the kelpie’s head was flat and flush with the rest of the metal sheet but, in the few weeks that we’ve had it, the head has started to curve round.
Perhaps it’s coming alive and is creepily turning to face the light?
Or … not:
My bastard cat.
Louis Catorze’s behaviour has been appalling lately and is deteriorating by the day, so this is no surprise. And this was just one time, in front of us. I can’t imagine how many times he probably does this when we’re not around.
So that’s another entry for our list of Nice Things Ruined By Cats. How long will it be until the kelpie’s snout is completely snapped off? Will it even last through the the Spooky Season?
My romantic vision was to see in the first day of my favourite season with a matcha latte outside, and with Louis Catorze happily pitter-pattering around me doing autumn cat things. Sadly it was raining heavily, so I sat indoors instead and waited for Catorze to join me.
He did … utterly drenched from gadding about outside.
Then, when I gave my latte a stir, the sound startled Catorze so greatly that he scarpered, stepping into my mug as he went. Yes, his actual foot went into my drink. Ugh.
I have learned that many of you wouldn’t care about this, but it’s a firm NOPE from me. Yes, I did Google the ingredients of my drink and whether or not they were toxic to cats, just in case he decided to lick it off. He will be fine.
Cat Daddy: “Maybe he is blind after all. Surely a cat with normal eyesight would’ve seen your mug and avoided it?”
Not if they were thick as well.
A season which begins with a cat stepping in your drink just has to get better, non?
The new season calls for a visit to the outdoor bar … and this time he’s stepping in his own drink.
We’ve just been to the vet for Louis Catorze’s steroid shot.
I was going to say something about how shit it was, but we haven’t had to take him since 1st July, so I don’t suppose I have much to complain about. I remember the time when we seemed to be taking him constantly, so much so that I thought we may as well take sleeping bags and go and live there. Now THAT was shit.
Whilst in the waiting room this time around, I noticed that the paraphernalia arranged in the Dog Area consisted of zany chews and toys, whereas in the Cat Area it was just cat magazines. The vet knows their target market well. Don’t ask us introverted cat people to do any mad capers that require effort; just give us something catty to read and leave us alone.
The cat who came out of the consultation room before us was a big, beautiful ginge called Murphy. He had been pretty quiet until then but, as soon as he heard Catorze, that set him off. Perhaps not surprisingly, their squawks sounded more like actual messages than just generic noise; we imagined Catorze screaming, “Nonnnnn, not ici again!” and Comrade Murphy telling him to run and save himself.
Anyway, Catorze has lost weight again – which we expected after three months without the thing that gives him the munchies – but at least he’ll be bouncy and sprightly for the spooky season. And when the vet said, “Is he a little bit … blind?” I was so shocked that I actually lost the power of speech, but Cat Daddy chimed in that Catorze is able to spot faraway random bugs and go chasing after them. So he can’t possibly be blind. If his reactions are slow, it’s probably because he’s old and a bit thick.
Oh, and he declined the vet’s offer of Dreamies. I didn’t dare ask if they had any jambon de Bayonne.
As if to prove me wrong, just as I wrote that bit about being old and thick, Catorze jumped off my lap and chased something between the table and the mirror. He may be old, but there’s plenty of [whatever unholy force it is that powers him] left in him.
I don’t know whether to wear a black armband or to raise a glass of something suitably solemn* to mark the fact that we are now up to Part 10 of this sorry saga. I may well do both.
*Is there such a thing as a solemn alcoholic drink, or is this something that only exists in my head? Exuberant drinks = Crémant or Pimms. Solemn drinks = port or whisky. Nobody parties with a port or a whisky, right?
I fancied a creamy salmon pasta the other night but, knowing how much Louis Catorze loves salmon and will happily take down anyone who stands in his way of it, I decided that I couldn’t cope with the consequences. So I ditched the salmon in favour of a bog-standard cheesy pasta, the kind of thing that busy mums make for their toddlers when they don’t have time and only have two things in the fridge.
Obviously I hate myself for compromising my dinner in anticipation of my cat bullying me for it. As it turns out, the compromise was utterly pointless as the little shit bullied me anyway.
This is the cacophonous din to which I was subjected. Apologies for the background noise of the Giro or the Vuelta or whatever dull cycling event was on television at the time:
As you can see, not only was Catorze merciless but Cat Daddy was about as much help as a brick parachute.
I couldn’t maintain the filming for long; it really wasn’t manageable alongside a simmering pot, tempting cheese and a screaming cat. I thought I did quite well to capture as much as I did.
Me: “He’s like a hungry shark, circling the cheese.”
Cat Daddy, without looking up from the cycling: “If you don’t want him bothering you for cheese, it’s simple: just don’t offer him any.”
Me: “What? I didn’t …”
Him: “And if he keeps asking, just tell him no.”
Me: “…”
Anyway, I was able to eat my pasta in relative peace, although I bolted it down as quickly as possible. Mealtimes, which used to be a source of great pleasure to us, are now a war zone. And, annoyingly, Cat Daddy blames me, a mere civilian, rather than the invading party, although I’m sure this is all part of Catorze’s mind control and gaslighting-by-proxy.
I know that others have had to suffer worse than this, for longer. I know that I was lucky to get away with it for as long as I did. But, seriously, what now? What do we do?
It’s official*: cat-cousin Rodan, aged ten months, is bigger than Louis Catorze, aged fourteen years.
*By “official” we mean “not actually official at all”.
Obviously the sensible way to prove this would have been to weigh them, or measure them nose-to-tail. THAT would have made it official. But, because we were too stupid to think of this, we decided instead to, erm, photograph each cat with a Carmex lip balm for scale.
Rodan – still a kitten.Catorze – no longer a kitten (but nobody has told him this).
Unfortunately Catorze won’t spread out like Rodan. Every time I put down the Carmex, he curls around to look at it, making himself look even smaller. But we can all still tell that Rodan is overall just a longer, rangier cat, whereas tiny Catorze is a forever-kitten.
It’s only a matter of time before Rodan’s sister Mothra also grows bigger than Catorze, making Catorze the smallest cat in our family (and, possibly, in the world). However, what Catorze lacks in size, he certainly makes up in [we still don’t have a word for all the stupid shit that he does].
Mothra – not a Chat Noir but still not to be trusted.
