Oh. Mon. Dieu. Louis Catorze has just eaten two tiny fragments of crisps. And they weren’t just normal crisps. They were fried egg-flavoured crisps.
I know. I know exactly what you’re thinking:
1. Yes, fried egg-flavoured crisps are a thing (and, unbelievably, they are delicious).
2. Catorze doesn’t eat human food (or so we thought).
3. Fried egg-flavoured crisps are as far along the human food spectrum as can possibly be, on the extreme right (or the extreme left, depending on which end you think is good and which is bad).
Naturellement my efforts to capture this on camera yielded nothing but the rather disturbing photo below, snapped just before he headbutted the phone out of my hand. So I have no actual proof. But we can file this under “Too absurd to have been made up”, non?
Red circle = piece of crisp shrapnel. Red arrow = Catorzian eye.
October, October, October, morning, noon and night. But, since Le Blog is already quite October-centric, I thought I’d make a change and write about December, which is my second favourite.
I love the frost, the dark mornings, the Yuletide decorations, the snow-set horror films, the seasonal ghost stories and the two glorious weeks off work. And I love the food. Oh God, I love the food. December is the one month of the year when I can buy a whole salmon terrine which serves six to eight people, and eat it all by myself.
If you know any Brits and plan to meet us this month, we will probably greet you by saying, “Oof! Bit chilly out!” and then doing a theatrical little shiver. It’s practically the law for us to say that to people as soon as December hits.
My workplace conversations often start (and end) like this:
Colleague: “Oof! Bit chilly out!” [Theatrical little shiver.]
Me: “I like it when it’s like this.”
Them: “…”
Me: “I know. I’m weird.”
Them: “Anyway, have a good day.”
In December, Louis Catorze is permanently attached to my lap in the daytime but leaves me the hell alone at night, preferring either his igloo or the fluffy brown blanket. If he chooses the latter, by the time I wrap myself in the blanket for my morning tea ritual, he has warmed it for me. And, once I do so, he hops onto my lap and we warm each other. So everyone’s warm and happy.
TUC is the best way to be.
Maybe Catorze has finally started to act his age (and his species)? Erm … if that’s what you’re thinking, let me stop you there. And, whilst most normal, older cats are shifting into hibernation mode, Catorze still finds the time and the energy to do this:
Right. I see.
I hope that the beauty of my second favourite month is bringing you as much joy as it is to Catorze. Are your furry overlords members of Team Sleeping-On-Fluffy-Blankets, Team Jumping-On-Shutters or, like our little sod, do they flit between both?
Nothing says “The joys of the Yuletide season” quite like a trip to the vet.
On Friday I had to take Louis Catorze for his steroid shot and, astonishingly, there was bone-chilling silence on the walk there. It was quite the departure from his usual gut-wrenching screaming, especially that one time when he screamed so badly that some random passer-by didn’t believe I was taking my cat to the vet, and thought I’d just grabbed Catorze off the street. The man actually stood and watched me as I walked off, to see if I even knew which way the vet was.
As soon as we arrived and Catorze realised that we were in his least favourite place in the world, he broke his silence. Luckily nobody else was in the waiting room at the time, so at least we were spared whining, upset dogs and other cats being goaded into joining in the screaming.
Anyway, we have two pieces of news:
Firstly, Catorze doesn’t have a heart murmur; the little shit was faking it. Thank God I didn’t find this out via the £500 scan.
Secondly, he has snapped the end off one of his fangs. It’s a minuscule chip, on the same side where one of his jowls hangs lower than the other, hence why we didn’t notice it despite knowing every millimetre of his silly little face. And there’s no exposed dental pulp (ugh – I wish I had never learned that this is a thing) so he isn’t experiencing any pain or sensitivity. But if it gets worse – and let’s face it, it’s hardly going to get better, is it? – the fang will have to come out.
We then talked about alternatives to steroids, such as hypoallergenic food (nope) and daily medication (nope), and a blood test (HELL to the NOPE) to determine the exact state of Catorze’s drug-ravaged innards. The vet also suggested that we monitor his drinking, but I have no idea how to do that; Catorze not only drinks from his glass but also from the surface of the outdoor table, the manky old watering can by the barbecue and probably a whole host of other vile places that don’t bear thinking about.
Oh, and the pleasure of all of the above cost me £80.
Within minutes of getting home and being released from his transportation pod, Catorze was on my lap. I don’t know whether he forgave me or whether he just forgot what had just happened, but I suspect the latter.
It’s 1st December or, as I like to call it, the first day of Psychological Winter.
Although we are very much a nature-minded household – well, it’s hard not to be when we live with a black vampire cat who informs us via his naughty behaviour when there’s a Bad Moon Rising – the date switching from November to December means it’s no longer autumn. My heart wants to believe that winter starts on the winter solstice, but my brain won’t let it; if I’m opening windows on my advent calendar and scraping ice off my car, then it’s not autumn.
Autumn, winter, whatever. Couldn’t give a merde.
Cat Daddy and I are having a competition to see which of us can attend more festive lunches than the other. So far, I’m winning with four versus Cat Daddy’s two, and he’s not happy about it. And he still maintains the idea that I cheated by starting mine in late November, whereas I just call that being organised.
So Cat Daddy threatened to have a Boys’ Club Christmas party, just him and Louis Catorze, to enable him to add one more to his tally. However, when I held him to his threat and even offered to make them some jambon de Bayonne and Comté canapés for the party, he started to backtrack.
Him: “I can’t have a Christmas party with just my cat. That’s the kind of thing some weird loner would do.”
Me: “I’d totally do it, if I could.”
Him: “So why don’t you?”
Erm, because the cat would decline my invitation, that’s why.
I am hoping that if I continue to bully encourage Cat Daddy, he will change his mind. Catorze would love nothing more than some festive fun with his papa but, in the meantime, he has other friends with whom to hang out.
Here he is, pictured at a previous Yuletide soirée, most likely laughing at one of his own jokes:
If you could meet a historical figure, who would it be and why?
It would be the person who invented tarot cards. Mainly so that I could apologise to them for this.
One of my friends gave me a set of black cat tarot cards for my birthday, and each one looks like Louis Catorze, with the alien eyes and the creepy stare. When I unwrapped the gift, my friend went through every card to see if any cats had fangs, and wouldn’t you just know it:
Oui, Mesdames et Messieurs, this was the ONLY FANGED CAT OF THE WHOLE SET.
I don’t need a tarot reading to predict Catorze’s behaviour – I always know that he will do the last thing I expect or want – so I decided to make this his own personal set, for him to do with as he pleases. What could possibly go wrong?
(Well, there’s opening a portal to hell and being damned for all eternity but, other than that, all good, non?)
I wanted to do this properly, so I had Catorze sleep with the cards under his autumn-winter igloo for a few for a few days. Don’t worry, I made sure they were all even and flat so that la personne royale wouldn’t feel any bumps, à la Princess and the Pea. I would have had some explaining to do when the cleaner lifted up the igloo to clean underneath, so I made sure I hid the cards during her visit and put them back after she’d gone. That said, had she found them, tarot cards under a cat bed wouldn’t have been the weirdest thing she’s seen in this house.
Naturellement the little sod can’t shuffle or cut the deck, so I did this for him and went for a straightforward three-card spread. Part of me was expecting everything to go all American Horror Story with a triple whammy of Death cards (even though there is only one Death card in each pack), but it didn’t go quite that way. Don’t get me wrong; it was still bad. Just bad in a different way.
After sleeping on my lap all day, when it was time to do the reading he disappeared outside. When he came back and I was finally able to begin, this was what ensued:
Nope.Still a nope.
Furthermore, the three that I drew contained two consecutive cards of the same arcana (arcana are a bit like suits), demonstrating that even through shuffling, spreading the cards under Catorze’s igloo and then gathering them and shuffling again, I hadn’t been thorough enough. So I shuffled once more … and got two consecutive ones of the same arcana AGAIN, demonstrating that my third shuffle had been just as shit as the first two.
At that point Catorze’s screaming and bouncing around were such that I gave up. But I haven’t given up forever. Meanwhile, here are my favourite cards from the Catorzian Arcana. Tarot-loving friends, what does my future hold?
The Fool.The Magician.The Hermit.The Emperor.The Tower.Judgement.
It’s been two months since Louis Catorze’s last steroid shot. He’s only allowed a maximum of one per month, and there have been times when I’ve anxiously checked my calendar, desperate to take him for the next one, to find that it’s only been three weeks and we somehow have to hang on for a little longer. So to reach the two-month milestone, at a time of year which usually sees the return of his problems, is quite something.
That said, I might book him in soon, to keep him nicely ticking over through December and to avoid the festive rush for the vet.
Cat Daddy: “Is there a festive rush for the vet?”
Well, not in the same way that there’s a rush for sliced white bread every December* but, knowing our luck, Catorze will hit us with some dire emergency five minutes after the vet closes for the holidays.
*It’s true: in the few days leading up to Christmas, there’s no shortage of turkeys or puddings; however, sliced white bread disappears from the shelves of every supermarket in West London, and nobody knows why. I don’t believe for a second that everyone suddenly has a burning need to make bread sauce from scratch. So who’s buying it? And what are they doing with it?
Catorze is wide-eyed, swishy-tailed, and his screaming is beyond belief. Even Puppy Mamma – who was a cat person until she betrayed the cause and defected to the other side – told me how curious and otherworldly he was, with his alien eyes and the body which remains kitten-like and petite despite his advancing years and lifelong drug use.
I have often said that he is the Dorian Gray of cats, and that has never been more true than now.
Every time I look at Louis Catorze, I think, “Aww. Our little boy has a heart murmur.” And he looks back at me, most likely thinking, “Oh, it’s you. Why are you still here?”
People have been asking after him and feeling quite sorry for him, but his symptoms so far have been screaming, demanding play and generally being a shite. During one especially energetic play session, he dug his claws into my foot and was utterly unrepentant even when I squealed in pain. But what completely floored me was catching the little sod lick my plate, from which I had just eaten tuna (10/10 for cat appeal) with soy sauce, chilli and lime (0/10 for cat appeal). And, later that same evening, he lunged for Cat Daddy’s plate of cheese.
Catorze has always been implicitly trustworthy around human food, to the point where we could even leave him to guard the cheese board if we had to pop out of the room. We knew not only that he would leave the cheese well alone, but that he would very kindly warn us about any approaching bugs, by doing the bird-chatter sound. (Yes, he makes this sound at any flying creature, including bugs.)
Now, it seems, we are going to have to watch him around food. Which is quite the opposite of what we expected to be doing for an older cat who has never shown any sign of giving the slightest shite about our food.
All those years of laughing at my cat freak friends who have to eat their dinner standing up on a chair, whilst their cats circle below like hungry saltwater crocodiles, have well and truly blown up in my face.
If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?
Anywhere but these green bits:
Surely the Damger Zone should be red, not green?
One of my blog followers, who lives in Oklahoma, told me that their cats would bring in tarantulas, dead and undead. They told me this a long time ago – some years, in fact – but it’s not the sort of thing that you easily forget.
For whatever reason I decided, last week, to check which US states had native tarantulas, expecting it to be just Oklahoma, Florida and perhaps a couple of the desert ones. I had no idea it would be as many as this, including Colorado (where we have friends and family members who have invited us to visit – it’s now a firm NOPE to that) and Louisiana (where we’d hoped to go on holiday next year – it’s a firm NOPE to that, too).
The only thing worse than visiting a tarantulary place would be living in one, with a cat who hunts. I could see Louis Catorze bringing in a tarantula, believing he could take it on, then realising that he’d quite literally bitten off more than he could chew and releasing the monster under my bed.
Actual footage of what might happen. (I know you can’t have “actual footage” of a hypothetical scenario, but please allow me this one.)
Do you live in the Danger Zone? Have you ever had to deal with any of the offending beasts (tarantulas, I mean, not bastard cats)? Part of me doesn’t want to know, yet the other part really, really does.
An old photo of my efforts to encourage Catorze to eat spiders, using reverse psychology.
My last blog post received quite the rapturous reception from my followers. As a tribute to the vigilante cats, I asked Bing’s AI bot to create a picture of them, along with their comrade Hunter, Scourge of Rottweilers (centre). I hope that they are strutting around kitty heaven looking just like this:
Yes, these were their actual fur colours.
In other news, if you followed Le Blog through lockdown, you will know that Louis Catorze was an absolute menace during my online lessons. He had a fondness for my Year 11 class in particular and, as soon as the clock hit 3:10 on Thursday afternoon, he would appear from wherever he was and wreak absolute havoc.
On Saturday I attended a Zoom talk about witchcraft and, naturellement, given his past form, I expected utter carnage. Luckily, on this occasion, it was one of those live streaming events in which the viewers remained invisible, so I didn’t really care what he did. We could have had a full-on heavy metal concert in the living room and neither the speaker nor the other viewers would have had the slightest idea.
However, to my absolute astonishment, Catorze was quiet. He listened intently for a while, then dozed off, with his ears occasionally flicking. Either he recognised these as his people and wanted to hear what they had to say, or he couldn’t be bothered to make trouble as there was zero embarrassment in it for me. Où est le fun in that?
Here he is, deeply engrossed in every single witchy word. Should I expect (more) trouble later?
I bet I’ll find an eye of newt and a toe of frog on my bed tomorrow.
Every so often, I read a cat story that utterly lights up my life. Last week I had one of those moments.
I follow a brilliant blog written by a gentleman called Louis Carreras – no, not because his name is Louis, but because he’s a great writer and I always learn new words from his work. My favourite posts from his blog are always the cat ones, in particular the anecdotes about his most memorable miscreant cat, Clancy (aka The Grey Menace).
Louis recently linked back to an absolute corker of a story from some years ago, and I loved it so much that I’ve been sharing it with anyone who’ll listen to me. If you only ever read one thing this week, PLEASE LET IT BE THIS.
There are many things to love about this story, but the main ones for me are, in no particular order:
1. The coffin factory. This sounds like the sort of place invented by the storyteller to protect the identity of the guilty, so to find out that this really was the setting for the story made me spit my tea all over my phone.
2. The police greeting Mr Carreras in the same way that one would greet an expert professional arriving at a crime scene. “Ahhh. We’re glad you’re here …” (I can’t help hearing the words “Mr Bond” or “young Skywalker” at the end, when I replay that part in my head.)
3. The blood. THE BLOOD.
4. The fact that Clancy and his (French) friend traumatised the burglar to such an extent that he ended up snitching on himself.
5. The fact that it was someone else’s cats and not mine. In fact, these two make Catorze look like a churchgoing Boy Scout.
Clancy the Grey Menace, Hunter the Scourge of Rottweilers and Seigneur Jean Le Foot, I salute you for your magnificence. What absolutely brilliant cats!
Louis Catorze would have given the burglar a big cuddle.
It might not be the best time for me to answer this prompt, since we have just returned home from taking Louis Catorze for his booster vaccination. If you have ever had to take an animal to a vet, you will know just how dire it can be: a fight to the death to shove a screaming hell-beast into a transportation vessel, more gladiatorial combat during the appointment itself, receiving news ranging from a bit shit to utterly heartbreaking, and having to hand over a ruinous sum of money at the end. It’s pretty grim.
Fortunately for us, our news today was only at the “a bit shit” end of the spectrum. After cooing and squeeing at how small Catorze is, and talking to him in her cat lady voice, the vet (who hadn’t met him before) checked his heart and told us that he had a heart murmur. “A very obvious one”, apparently.
The symptoms of a heart murmur could be any of the following*:
• Chronic weight loss or muscle wasting
• Decreased appetite
• Hiding behaviour
• Weakness
• Coughing or wheezing
• Exercise intolerance: panting with mild exertion
• Increased respiratory rate at rest
• Increased effort to breathe, open mouth breathing, abdominal push to exhale, dyssynchronous breathing (I had to Google “dyssynchronous” because that spelling didn’t, and still doesn’t, look right), or outstretched neck
• Fluid from mouth or nostrils
• Change in the colour of the gums to blue, grey or white
• Lethargy
• Collapse
• Paralysis of the hind limbs
• Painful vocalisation
Catorze has never shown any of these. (Well, his vocalisation is often painful for those who are forced to listen to it, but I don’t suppose that’s what they mean here.)
The appointment cost us £72, which comes hot on the heels of the £63.92 that we paid a few days ago for his 8-weekly subscription of the most expensive cat food on the planet. At the end of the month, his £80 steroid shot is due. And, if we want to find out exactly how bad the heart murmur is, we have the option of a £500 scan.
People have been asking us how Catorze is, and our answer is the same as ever: full of beans and loving life. He doesn’t know that he has a heart murmur and, even if he did, he wouldn’t give even the faintest hint of a shite.
“Not very well” yet well enough to stare at me with utter contempt.
*I am not a medical practitioner. If you think your cat might have a heart murmur, or even if you’re not sure and think they may just be milking it for attention, don’t be guided by what I’ve said here. Please consult an actual vet.
Hallowe’en may be over, but Louis Catorze is still creeping the hell out of us.
When you’re a black cat, you are able to blend seamlessly into darkness. We know this; we have kicked Catorze about 9,742 times in the dark because we didn’t realise he was there. You would be forgiven, therefore, for thinking we might be unaffected by Catorze creepy-staring at us in the dark. After all, what we can’t see shouldn’t bother us, right?
Erm, not quite.
It’s quite strange that he chooses to do this when he’s less visible., although perhaps he doesn’t know that he’s less visible, since he has Creepy Kitty Night Vision? Anyway, he ought to be easy – or at least EASIER – to ignore in the dark, but this is the sight that blighted our television viewing the other night:
Dead, soulless eyes.
Catorze’s favourite lap (not mine) was free, his bowl was full, his water was topped up, he’d been out at The Front and we were already in his favourite room. We still don’t know what he wanted, and I can’t say we are looking forward to finding out.
Quite simply, I can’t and I don’t. And, of every one of the 836 hours per day that I spend on my phone, 736 are spent on WordPress documenting Louis Catorze’s stupid shit. (The other 100 are spent messaging people to complain about his stupid shit, and editing photos of him to try to make him look even passably presentable.)
When I first started Le Blog back in 2014, Catorze wasn’t in the best of health so my posts tended to be about medical issues rather than about his misdeeds. And, of course, being unwell meant that he didn’t have the energy or the inclination to be especially naughty. In fact, there were weeks when I would only post once. ONCE.
Now that he’s much better, of course, it’s non-stop.
We are rolling steadily towards winter, a time when most normal cats – especially ones of, erm, advanced years – start to calm down. However, Catorze is still up to mischief, still taking awful photos, and I still need my daily therapy of messaging friends to vent, which means that my screen time doesn’t look set to change anytime soon. In fact, if anything, it will get worse.
Here he is, utterly unrepentant, having just upended the bin bag (pictured behind him) and covered himself in bin juice, AGAIN:
(Click on the link above and SCROLL DOWN for the video. Don’t click on the first video you see as it’s some weird thing that you have to pay for.)
Louis Catorze is vert de jalousie for not thinking of this himself.
Cue a hilarious, comedic chase around the pitch accompanied by the Benny Hill theme music* (well, ok, there wasn’t really any music; I just played the song to myself in my head because it seemed appropriate to do so). Alebrijes Oaxaca, the home team and whose name actually refers to animal spirit guides, were in no huge rush to retrieve the ball; they were 4-0 up at the time and were happy to have the minutes run down without having to make any effort to waste time.
*Younger followers: ask your grandparents. Non-Brits: ask your British friends of a certain age.
The dog, Max, has since become the club’s mascot (despite the cheeky sod actually having a home) and has even been seen in training. The following photos are from the club’s official Instagram page:
Excellent possession.With his new teammates.No fouling on the pitch, please.
As for Dorados, the visiting team, if they weren’t cat people before, they probably are now. And I know a cat who would be the perfect mascot. Global fame, causing absolute chaos and being chased around by lots of men? Merci, s’il vous plaît, to all of the above.
louiscatorze.com 