The night after his full moon shenanigans, Louis Catorze was a transformed cat: calm, relaxed and, dare I say it, quiet.
Cat Daddy: “Were you just showing off last night, Louis? Just because we had a friend round?”
Catorze: “Mwah!”
Just as a tree falling in a forest makes no sound if people aren’t around to witness it, Catorze, apparently, is, erm, 0.01% less embarrassing when it’s just us.
Whilst others are filming yet another glamorous video in the life of their Insta-perfect cat, I am sitting here trying to figure out the answers to the following questions:
What is stuck to Catorze’s fur?
How did it get there?
How am I going to remove it?
Why on earth do I allow this beast to sleep in the same bed with me?
Any suggestions will be received with more gratitude than you can ever imagine.
Lovely.EDIT: It came out eventually, although I had to be quite brutal. And now Catorze’s grey under-fur is sticking out from the excision site.
As you are aware, Louis Catorze is visibly more unhinged than usual when it’s a full moon, so much so that I don’t even need to check my moon phase app; his behaviour is enough of an indicator.
Last night we had a Blue Supermoon. I don’t understand what one is exactly, but that’s irrelevant; all that matters is that Catorze knew it was time to go apeshit. And the fact that we had a friend over for dinner made it even better/worse, depending on how you look at it; extra audience members only ramp up the embarrassment factor and make it more for fun (for him, not for us).
Catorze greeted my friend upon arrival, as every good host should.
Her: “Ahhh! Louis!”
Me: “He’s been annoying the shit out of me lately.”
Her: “Why, what’s he been doing?”
Catorze: “MWAAAAHHHHH!”
Her: “Oh.”
And that was it; the scream demon was unleashed. As my friend is also a teacher I asked her opinion on some work I’d prepared for a class next year, including listening to a recording, and Catorze screamed through that, too. Then, as we ate our dinner outside, he jumped onto the fence and onto That Neighbour’s roof, pitter-pattering across their skylight and screaming himself witless.
All the while I was eating furiously, thinking that the sooner we could finish, the sooner we could go indoors.
After tiring of trying to rouse That Neighbour, Catorze decided to start walking on our awning. He walked around and around in aimless circles, making the fabric bulge with paw-shaped indentations, and then it dawned on us that he was stuck and didn’t know how to get down.
Don’t believe me? Just watch.
Cat Daddy went the bathroom, with the intention of corralling the little sod through the open window. However, after a few minutes he returned, catless, and told us that Catorze had approached the window, almost come in, but then changed his mind and returned to walking aimless, screaming circles on the roof and awning again.
There was absolutely nothing we could do, so we just left him to it and hoped he would just figure out that the bathroom window was his only way in. However, when it was time for pudding, there was no sign of him at all. We called him, unable to hear a response or see him on the awning, but also not quite daring to retract the awning in case he ended up rolled up inside like a layer of jam inside a Swiss roll*.
*Younger followers: ask your British friends in their forties. Don’t ask your Swiss friends because they won’t know what you are talking about.
We came indoors to eat our pudding in the front room, as it had turned quite chilly outside. There we found Catorze, sitting happily, having heard us calling and searching yet not bothered to do anything about it.
Just before 11pm, I drove my friend to the station. As soon as I returned, Catorze escaped out at The Front.
Cat Daddy: “He’s all over the place. Do you think it’s the full moon?”
The moon is actually the least terrifying explanation. I dread to think that it’s alien intervention, demonic possession or, worst of all, that THIS IS JUST WHAT MY CAT IS LIKE.
We have a Code Rouge situation at Le Château: a mosquito in the room. It has dive-bombed and bitten me about 5,872 times in the last half hour but Louis Catorze, who is on my lap, is doing absolutely nothing about it.
The little sod has been known to jump off my lap and run across the room, IN THE DARK, to eat poor, hapless bugs who are just silently minding their own business on the opposite wall and whom I didn’t even know were there. Yet he is sleeping through repeated attacks by an annoying, metallic-humming little shit of a beast, stirring only to meow disdainfully at my failed attempts to slap this creature dead.
Most irritatingly of all, the mosquito is making no attempt to bite Catorze. Perhaps having to penetrate a layer of manky fur to reach his drug-addled blood isn’t too appealing. Or – and this is far more likely – perhaps he commands the creatures of the night, and he’s already told this mosquito that he doesn’t want to be bitten, merci s’il vous plaît?
Does this face look as if he may be the master of all bloodsucking beasts? Erm …
At the start of the week, the chat-sitteur who looked after Louis Catorze whilst we were in Scotland, came round for dinner with her lovely family.
Catorze was happy to see her, but BESIDE HIMSELF to spend time with her brother (no great surprise there as he, erm, prefers the company of gentlemen). And, luckily, the feeling was mutual. Chat-Sitteur’s Brother cradled him like a baby and talked to him in his Cat Lady voice, telling him what a good boy he was (I know – we just went along with it) and how lovely his fangs were.
Chat-Sitteur: “He never lets me hold him like that.”
I hear you. Really, I do.
Every cat person (apart from Cat Daddy) knows that, when you have a cat on your lap, it’s against the law to move until the cat moves. So, if you want something, you have to ask for it to be brought to you, and in this household we call it being Trapped Under Cat, or TUC (although “Incatpacitated” is also rather good, if impossible to say).
Chat-Sitteur’s Brother has now introduced us to a twist to this sacred state, with the following words to his sister: “Could you please feed me my glass of wine, because I don’t have any hands free and don’t want to stop cuddling Louis?”
This is a new one for us. But, naturellement, his sister willingly obliged.
Here are Catorze and his new best friend, all loved up:
Catorze would love him to live here. (Instead of me, not as well as.)
And, knowing that not much makes Cat Daddy more angry than me texting whilst TUC to request food and water, surely he should be relieved and grateful that I have never asked to be fed (yet)?
Oh. Mon. Dieu. I have just accidentally pocket-called Ocado whilst feeding Blue the Smoke Bengal (whose mamma is away). So one of their delivery drivers now has a six-minute message from me, telling him what a gorgeous, meaty boy he is.
Meaty.
Cat Daddy, when I told him later: “Can’t you just delete it?”
Oh my. How glorious life would be if this were a thing. Poor, clueless Cat Daddy.
Him: “Did you say anything else, apart from “You gorgeous, meaty boy”?”
Me: “Not really. It was pretty much just that.”
Him: “What, for six minutes?”
Me: “FOR SIX MINUTES.”
Him: “…”
Me: “I want to die.”
Him, without looking up from his phone: “Maybe you should.”
Me: “…”
Him: “There’s no way I can reframe this for you.”
Me: “…”
If you’re not a UK resident, you may not be aware that every Ocado delivery driver has the same phone number (in our area, at least). And I don’t think we’ve ever had the same driver twice. So having no idea which driver will have picked up the message makes the already-excruciating situation even worse.
Could it be Karanjeet driving the Plum van? Christopher driving the Cherry van? Or someone else entirely? Since it probably wouldn’t do to ask each driver who turns up, “Are YOU the gorgeous, meaty boy?”, I don’t suppose we will ever know.
Anyway, whilst I agonise over what I can do to recover from this – even though I know the answer is probably nothing – we can never order from Ocado again. Or, at least, I will have to hide whilst Cat Daddy accepts the delivery.
This is what Louis Catorze would look like sneering at my stupidity – if he actually cared:
A few days ago, a video popped up on my social media feed entitled, “How to tell if your cat is spoilt”. Obviously I need to contact Meta and ask them to check their algorithms, because that couldn’t have been intended for me.
Because I read it in a hurry, I didn’t make a note of all the points mentioned. But these are the ones that I recall:
1. They meow a lot.
Oh dear. That DOES sound rather like a certain cat I know. According to the maker of the video, excessive meowing means the cat is used to getting his own way and knows all the buttons to press. However, what about the cat who just wanders from room to room, screaming, just for fun?
2. They are lazy.
Now, “lazy”, to me, either means lying around like a hairball doing nothing, or not doing your designated job to the best of your ability. Louis Catorze certainly sleeps a lot, but it seems to be with the purpose of powering up for mischief. Screaming, 3am parkour, bullying us and annoying the local wildlife are certainly not “doing nothing”; this is serious action, even if it’s not the kind of action we want.
As for not doing his job properly … what even is it that Catorze is supposed to do? Can he be accused of not doing his job properly, if he doesn’t actually have one (and never did)?
Here he is, not wanting anything, just liking the sound of his own voice. YOU try for peace, when you’re living with this:
It’s like this all the time.My friend, in response to this still from the above video: “Good grief. Is that AI?” Erm, no. My cat really is this weird.
We came home after a night out to find a nice pile of cat puke on the bed. Louis Catorze has never thrown up on a bed before, not once in ten years. And, because we didn’t know it had happened, it had seeped through the duvet cover and onto the actual duvet.
Oh, and of course it had to be the new, fancy eucalyptus silk bedding, and not the ancient polycotton shite that I’ve had for years.
When I went to fetch some cleaning products, I could hear Cat Daddy in the bedroom, crashing around and shouting, “What puke? I can’t see any.”
I yelled, “Noooo, don’t touch anything!” but I was too late. In his quest to find the puke – why he needed to see it for himself, I really don’t know – Cat Daddy had flipped the duvet, sending puke flying in all directions. He was several pints of beer under, plus wine and port, but making a bad situation worse is the kind of thing he would have done whilst sober anyway.
When I was at university, I would frequently do my washing in the early hours of the morning, often falling asleep drunk in the laundry room, because it was the only time of day when the two (2) washing machines, shared between three hundred (300) students, were free. I thought those days were behind me. Yet there I was, seemingly having travelled thirty years back in time, doing it again. Only this time I made Cat Daddy wait until the cycle was finished and hang it all up to dry, since he was the one who hadn’t believed me in the first place.
Having just a sheet over me doesn’t give me the protection from the cold and from parkouring paws, in the same way that a duvet does. So I had awful sleep, alternating between shivering and being stamped on/screamed at. And the next morning, the little sod was nowhere to be found. (I still don’t know where he went. Probably next door.)
So, total shits given by the perpetrator = < 0.
I guess I now need to worry about why he did this. Cats puke all the time, I know that. But perhaps he was just too slow to jump off the bed before it happened? And, if so, how is it that he still manages 3am parkour?
We washed the sheet that belongs with the puke-duvet and put it out here to dry. He couldn’t WAIT to pounce.
In the 1998 film Sliding Doors, PR executive Helen misses a train; we see how her life unfolds after that, as well as seeing an alternate universe in which she DID catch the train. I look back upon The Great Salmon Grab and long for the life I would have had, had I not left my dinner unattended on that fateful night.
Louis Catorze is – how can I put this? – not the fizziest drink in the fridge. But, dammit, he remembers The Great Salmon Grab. And now it’s official: we can never eat smoked salmon of any sort in the house again, EVER.
Catorze was outside when I started preparing our smoked salmon salad dinner. Since it was regular smoked salmon rather than the hot-smoked variety, I thought this meant that he wasn’t interested. Or, perhaps, he was so engrossed in annoying the local wildlife that he didn’t know I was handling smoked salmon.
What a mistake this was.
As soon as we sat down to eat, he appeared, trying to stick his face into my plate and screaming bloody murder.
And, tempting though it is to throw him a sliver, the way characters in old cartoons used to throw strings of sausages to dogs to distract them, the short-term gain of being able to eat that one meal in peace would also be the beginning of the end.
Me: “We’ve created a monster, haven’t we?”
Cat Daddy: “What do you mean, “we”?”
Yes, Cat Daddy still blames me for the situation.
Look at Catorze bullying Cat Daddy for his salmon, having just finished screaming at me for mine. This is our life now.
I have just witnessed a squirrel screaming at Louis Catorze, and I think it might be the funniest thing I’ve ever heard.
Initially, when I heard the sound, I thought it was a magpie or a crow. I wouldn’t ordinarily bother to investigate such sounds, because I know that Catorze probably started it and that he can handle himself. But, when the noise didn’t stop, part of me wondered whether Catorze was being sick. His usual puke sounds aren’t quite this persistent or nasal, but I would have felt bad if he’d had something stuck in his throat and I hadn’t tried to help him.
I’m not sure I was even aware that squirrels could make sounds. Now, I am. And this isn’t a sound that I’ll forget in a hurry:
Is it a crow with a kazoo?
Although you can’t see Catorze fully, you can see his little feet a couple of seconds in, under the table, walking past. Yes, he walked away languidly and lazily, as if he thought, “I just can’t be bothered with this”.
The squirrel gave a few more seconds of, “Don’t walk away when I’m talking to you! Oy! OYYYY!” Then, as soon as Catorze was indoors, the noise stopped.
I don’t know what this means but, since the little sod’s relations with the squirrels haven’t exactly been positive over the years, what with attempted pursuits up telegraph poles even when Côned, lopped-off tails and all, I can’t imagine that anything good is about to happen.
Catorze knows where this is heading, but he has invoked his right to remain silent (for once).
Resting but on the lookout for more squirrels to annoy.
Louis Catorze LOVES going out in the rain. Nobody understands it, but he does.
After a few utterly unbearable days of heat, it has finally started to rain. The vast majority of Catorze’s kills take place during storms, so we await the next few days with some trepidation. But that’s our problem and not his.
If anyone wants the little sod they can find him here, plotting the next round of bloodshed:
Cat Daddy, after an especially alarming clap of thunder: “He’ll probably be terrified and run indoors now.” Nope.
Since The Great Salmon Grab, Cat Daddy and I have been very nervous about buying hot-smoked salmon again. We took some on holiday to Scotland, and bought more whilst up there, but we haven’t really had the experience of attempting to eat it at home with a demented cat trying to wrestle us for it.
A couple of nights ago, I decided that it was the night. My plan was to wait until Louis Catorze was out before preparing the salmon. It was a warm evening, so he would probably spend most of it in the garden on Rodent Duty outside, non?
Well … NON.
The little sod just wouldn’t go out. He just loitered suspiciously around the living room, probably imagining that I couldn’t see him but I knew his game.
Within the yellow circle, if you zoom in, you can just see the tip of a Catorzian ear.
Sadly, he also knew MY game, and he wasn’t moving. At least, not before suddenly retching and producing the most enormous triple-puke I have ever seen. I swear that the whole lot combined would have weighed more than him. After cleaning up the unholy mess, suddenly I wasn’t really in the mood for food. And, having ruined my dinner plans by making me too repulsed to eat, Catorze’s work was done so he finally went out.
I then realised that this could be my only chance to eat the hot-smoked salmon undisturbed. So, despite not really being hungry, I prepared a cauliflower rice risotto with lemon, dill and black pepper, then placed the salmon fillet on top, and settled back down in the living room to enjoy it.
As soon as I sat down, Catorze was back. In fact, he was so quick that I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he had pretended to go outside, just to trick me. And, for the next fifteen minutes, I was subjected to a torrent of clambering, headbutting and, of course, the most God-awful screaming. I don’t have evidence of it, because I wasn’t able to eat AND fight off a homicidal cat AND film the proceedings with just two hands. But, believe me, it was bad.
And that, Mesdames et Messieurs, is the tragic tale of how we can never eat hot-smoked salmon at home again. What has happened to our sweet little cat who had no interest in our food? And how go we get rid of this evil changeling that’s somehow been swapped with him?
How would you describe yourself to someone who couldn’t see you?
Louis Catorze wouldn’t need to. Anyone who couldn’t see him would certainly hear him and, after that, they probably wouldn’t want any further information.
Sometimes you just need to sit in the Japanese anemones and scream your guts out. (This photo was Le Roi’s Official Autumn Equinox Portrait 2018.)
Last week we bumped into our chat-sitteur in the pub, and we chatted about our holiday and her time trapped living in Le Château with Catorze.
She told us how much she enjoyed spending time with such a loving cat, which was quite a novelty to her since she lives with more reserved cats; Scully is more into sleeping, and her usurper stepsister Zelda prefers to direct her attention to catching birds. However, at times Catorze was also rather demanding and rude, trying to knock her phone out of her hand if she wasn’t quick enough in delivering the cuddles.
There were also the now-customary disrupted Zoom meetings, which started with the also-now-customary screaming. This was initially off-camera, then the chat-sitteur’s colleagues would say, “Ah, are you looking after that cat again?” and finally he would appear in a “Ta-dahhh!” kind of way, entering stage/screen left and bidding everyone a friendly bonjour.
The chat-sitteur’s boyfriend commented that he had “never met a cat so affectionate or so loud”. We get it, mon gars. Really, we do.
A few days before our pub meet-up, there was some discussion on my online cat group about cat voices, especially those of Chats Noirs. Catorze, it seems, is quite distinctive in his volume. Others described or posted evidence of their Dark Overlords’ beautiful, melodic little trills and, interestingly, Catorze was on my lap as I listened to his comrades but didn’t so much as flick an ear. That said, certain cats’ voices HAVE been known to make him really sit up and take notice, however deep his slumber. One of them is his own.
Oui, Mesdames et Messieurs: HIS OWN VOICE SHOCKS HIM WHEN IT IS PLAYED BACK TO HIM. Is he genuinely wondering what child of the night is making such sweet music … or, like the rest of us, is he embarrassed upon hearing himself on audio/video?
Here is a medley of the best/worst (depending on your point of view) Catorzian screams. You may wish to turn the volume down:
Greeting me when I returned home from work, having previously escaped out at The Front.
Another escape out at The Front, then changing his mind and wanting back in.
I honestly have no idea what was happening in Boys’ Club here.
Typical of what? If we mean typical of what would happen to most people most of the time, I hope not. But typical of the usual shite that happens here? Most likely, yes.
Louis Catorze has just dipped his tail into my tea. This has happened before but, on this occasion, he kept it in the cup and swished it around a couple of times. And, when he lifted it back out, he slapped it first onto the sofa and then onto my clothes.
Now, for most normal cats – if you are among the scarce few people on earth who own one of those – a slapping tail is bad news. Every cat book and website warns us that it’s a “Don’t make me angry” warning. But, for Catorze, it’s a sign of contentment. I know how idiotic this sounds, and if you’re a cat behaviourist you will probably be rolling your eyes at how I can possibly be this stupid. But trust me: slappy is happy when it comes to the Catorzian tail.
Anyway, now I need to get another mug. Except I’m TUC so I can’t. Yet I don’t want to go without tea, either, so I’m giving serious thought to reaching for the teapot in front of me and drinking straight from the spout.
What would you do?
Are you:
1. Team Go Tealess Until The Cat Moves?
2. Team Dislodge The Cat And Fetch Another Mug?
3. Team Drink Straight From The Teapot?
4. (Saint Jésus, PLEASE no) Team Drink From The Taily Mug?
On Friday night, Cat Daddy and I watched the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics. If you missed it, just chug a couple of shots of overproof vodka and watch back-to-back episodes of Dr Who (from the 1970s, not recent ones) on YouTube, and you’ll have a similar experience. And, if you fancy a giggle, check out the Brits on social media, moaning about the speakers addressing everyone in French. Yes, speaking French, the official language of the games, in Paris. Imagine that!
Louis Catorze was conspicuously absent throughout and, although it was disappointing that he didn’t want to sit with us and witness this historic event in his fatherland, we didn’t think much of it. He has been known to go missing for hours and be absolutely fine – and, no, we still don’t know exactly where he goes. It’s probably better that way.
Then Family Next Door informed us that he was at their place.
Me: “The hell is he doing there?”
Mamma Next Door: “Watching the Olympics.”
Right.
I was so shocked that my brain didn’t even think to say, “It must be some other black cat”. Not that there would have been much point, as Family Next Door know Catorze like they know their own names.
Plus there was no denying this pose in this photo:
Yes, the black markup pen was required here.Daddy Next Door very kindly provided his own edited version.
That said, I don’t know why I was shocked, as Catorze is known for wandering into other people’s houses. That Neighbour once found him upstairs on the landing, screaming himself senseless. And our previous neighbour thought she had mice but, when she looked under her bed to find the source of the mysterious scrabbling, it was Catorze.
There have also been various reports of his failed attempts to break into people’s houses. In one case he was battering at the door in a quite insistent manner, undeterred by the dog on the other side.
I wonder whether Catorze strutted home on Friday night, thinking, “Ha – these jobards don’t know where I’ve been”? Regretfully, unless we actually confront him next door – and, if you’ve ever bumped into your cats unexpectedly outside of your home, you will know how hilarious their faces are when they see you – the little sod will never know that we’re onto him.
If Catorze were a dog, people would be really cross with us for not training him properly. It’s a good thing he’s a cat, because everyone seems to understand that cats do whatever the heck they want. Even if it’s not what we want.
