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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.

  • Dis juste non

    How often do you say “no” to things that would interfere with your goals?

    My only goal in life is to sleep, and anyone who struggles to sleep will understand this. A good night’s sleep doesn’t simply make me feel better; it makes LIFE feel better. On those precious, rare days when I’ve slept well, I bounce through the day with the vitality of, erm, a small black cat on steroids. And, when I haven’t, I often wonder whether it’s even safe for me to be around people.

    I have done everything in the Sleep Text Book to make it work: an enormous bed, eucalyptus silk bedding, a soft colour scheme and a gentle alarm which wakes me to the sound of birdsong rather than a tinny, synth version of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik or some such thing. I’ve even booted Cat Daddy out because of his snoring, and he is now banished to the attic bedroom.

    So why, then, after all these efforts, do I allow Louis Catorze into the bedroom at night?

    You’d think there would be plenty of room on a super-king-sized bed for me and a 3kg cat. Well, yes. But also: no.

    The little sod is the most disagreeable bedfellow imaginable. More often than not he comes in soaking wet and screaming. And, after a few rounds of nocturnal parkour on the bed, instead of cuddling quietly beside me, his favourite thing is to sleep on top of me, either on my chest in Loaf Pose, or across my stomach like a furry, living belt.

    (He does the same to chat-sitteurs when they stay here. They tell me that they find it cute, which it probably is if you’re just visiting. Living with it is distinctly less cute.)

    Oh, and there are also incidents such as this one. And this one.

    Catorze is the one thing that interferes with my one goal. So why don’t I say no to him? Why do I persist in letting him into the bedroom?

    This isn’t rhetorical; I would genuinely like to know the answer.

    You make yourself comfortable, little sod.

  • Le printemps est inexorable

    It’s official: Cat Daddy has banned the Spring Zing from Le Château. I’m not sure how to keep it out, but I imagine we’ll be covering the windows in tin foil and nailing the doors shut. It’ll be like The Mist meets The Purge, only much less fun because we’ll be sealing the antagonist inside the house with us.

    Louis Catorze has lost the plot. On Friday morning he jumped onto Cat Daddy’s record deck and knocked one of our favourite ornaments onto the floor. It didn’t break (although it was already chipped from a previous fall – can you guess how that happened?), but now it’s rolled under the sofa and I can’t reach it.

    Immediately after dropping the ornament, he did this:

    What even is this? A victory dance? A goal celebration? Nobody knows.

    That evening, the shenanigans continued. Catorze jumped onto the side table by the window in the living room, to inform us that he wanted to go out at The Front. He has done this 8,642 times without mishap but, on this occasion, his fat arse knocked Cat Daddy’s favourite mug* off the table, sending tea and broken china in all directions. Unrepeatable Expletives of the Worst Kind were yelled at Catorze (including that really bad one), and I mean YELLED. If you live down our street, you probably heard this. Sorry.

    *I Googled it, to buy him another one, and it costs £24. Yes, for one mug. Gaah.

    Me, to Catorze: “Aww. Your daddy didn’t mean to call you that name.”

    Cat Daddy: “…”

    Me, to Cat Daddy: “You didn’t, did you?”

    Cat Daddy: “What do you mean? Of course I ****ing did.”

    It’s also been kicking off at Maison Blue, although this is Cat Daddy’s doing, not Blue’s. Cat Daddy locked Blue’s keys in the house during one feed, so we couldn’t get in to do the next one. We had to resort to shoving handfuls of Orijen through the letterbox – again – until Blue’s human sister rescued the key and handed it back to us. And, although I have previously icked at the thought of cats drinking water from gross places, this time I’m actually glad because at least his mamma’s bird bath water kept him going.

    All this, and it’s not even a full moon yet?

    I also checked to see whether Mercury Retrograde was imminent, and it is. Very. Will Le Château even still be standing by then?

    Not even Count Dracula, hanging behind Le Roi, can bear to watch the bullshittery unfold.

  • L’allégorie du printemps

    Louis Catorze has completely lost the gnarled, world-weary look that made us worry that he might be on his way out. He is bright-eyed, plushy-furred, full of energy and unbelievably annoying.

    This change seemed to take place very suddenly, in the few days leading up to the spring equinox, almost as if he knew it was coming. And it makes perfect sense: since he always knows when it’s a full moon (and informs us as such with his stupid behaviour, to the point where we don’t even bother checking the calendar), why wouldn’t he be aware of the changing of the seasons, too?

    This is how his Spring Zing has manifested itself thus far:

    ⁃ Pestering the hell out of Cat Daddy and a (male) colleague, when they were trying to have a meeting in the front room.

    ⁃ Playing energetically with his catnip toys.

    ⁃ Nocturnal parkour, using me as the terrain d’entraînement, and taking his rest breaks lying across my stomach, like a living, furry belt.

    – Nightly requests to go out at The Front (which are granted or denied, depending on whether it’s Cat Daddy or me on duty).

    ⁃ Screaming at birds in the garden.

    ⁃ Sticking his face into toxic plants in which he hasn’t shown the slightest interest until now.

    ‘Tis the season to be poisoned. Silly cat.

    It’s a full moon on Monday, so can we expect worse then?

    And, since I’m feeding Blue the Smoke Bengal for a few days, whilst his mamma is away, is he going to give me grief, too?

    A crescent moon Blue. Don’t be fooled by the teddy bear appearance.

  • Acueillir le printemps

    Some say that the Spring Equinox marks the first day of spring. For others, it’s 1st March (Meteorological Spring here in the UK) or even the last Sunday in March, the day that the clocks go forward. Cat people, however, know that spring is here when our furry overlords start spending more time outdoors and getting up to all sorts of mischievous capers.

    No, not this. This is not what I had in mind at all:

    Is this “mischievous”? Is this a “caper”? What even is this?

    Now, hear us out.

    Although Louis Catorze was out at The Front on the night that this took place (having heard me say “Don’t even THINK about running out!” as I was putting out the recycling and clearly seeing that as some sort of dare), this calling card really isn’t his style. However, we still had to think of something to say to Family Next Door, whose pavement space was the worst hit by the mess, before they saw it for themselves and made their own assumptions.

    These were our options:

    1. “Louis was not responsible for this; he rarely ever catches birds.” (Nope: this still implies that he catches them occasionally, and/or that he catches other animals more often.)

    2. “Louis was not responsible for this; leaving a trail of feathers really isn’t his thing.” (Nope: this suggests that he’s still a murderer, but one who tidies up after himself.)

    3. “Louis was not responsible for this; he wasn’t even out at The Front at the time.” (Nope: that last bit is a lie, because he WAS out at The Front at the time. Plus Family Next Door have a doorbell camera so they might even have seen him pitter-patter by, putting him at the scene of the crime irrespective of whether he did it.)

    In the end we went for the direct yet also deliberately minimalistic, “Louis was not responsible for this”.

    Daddy Next Door messaged us back with this:

    They saw this at an art fair. I have no idea why they chose to send us a photo.

    Obviously there’s been some mistake and they intended to send this some other cat-owning neighbour. I’m sure they will be mortified when they realise what they’ve done. Ahem.

    Anyway, the mystery remains: who is the murderer*? And, more importantly, where is the body**?

    *I would bet my house on it being Blue the Smoke Bengal. This is EXACTLY his MO.

    **In Blue’s belly.

    The Spring Zing is a thing.

  • Les deux côtés de la clôture

    Josh the fence-fixing man has been to fix our fence (obviously, since he’s a fence-fixing man), after it blew over in high winds.

    The reason why Family Next Door want a sturdy fence.

    As he walked through our kitchen towards the patio doors, Josh commented on our ouija chopping board (a gift from one of Louis Catorze’s chat-sitteurs). Cat Daddy told him that we were into all manner of spooky stuff although, worryingly, he didn’t mention that it was a chopping board and just let Josh think it was an actual ouija board.

    Naturellement, talk of spooky stuff comes hand in hand with talk of Catorze, so Cat Daddy mentioned that we had a black cat. Josh replied that he had a phobia of black cats, with a particular incident triggering this: a black cat once ran across the road when he was turning at a roundabout. Days later, at the same roundabout, the same thing happened again, only this time Josh crashed his car, resulting in severe, long-lasting and still-visible injuries.

    OH. MON. DIEU.

    It was then a race against time to find Catorze and shove him into a lead-lined underground vault, before he could enter stage left and make Josh either have a heart attack or do himself further physical damage whilst trying to run away. But the little sod was nowhere to be found.

    I looked in every room, even under the beds, and I couldn’t find him. It’s a bit difficult to contain a potential threat when you don’t know where it is.

    At a loss for what else to do, I went to the supermarket and left Cat Daddy to hold the Château. When I returned, expecting to see either the place in burning ruins or an ambulance parked outside for stricken Josh, the fence work had been completed, with no Catorzian interference whatsoever. In fact, nobody even knew where he was.

    I bet THAT’S a plot twist that none of you were expecting. Be honest: you thought it would be all Armageddon and ambulances too, right?

    Eventually I found Catorze under the guest room bed, in a cardboard box of Cat Daddy’s cycling clothes.

    What happened? Could it be that Catorze picked up on the difference between annoying the merde out of someone who found him a bit creepy, as opposed to traumatising a genuinely scared, injured man, and was charitable enough to give Josh a break? Or is it more likely that his nocturnal gallivanting had gone on until late the previous night, causing him to sleep through the whole morning?

    I’ll leave you to think about that one.

    See? Doesn’t this look say “charitable”?

  • Aussi fou qu’un chat enragé

    I have been a little worried about Louis Catorze these last few days and, when Cat Daddy asked me at what point we should take him to the vet, I knew that he was worried, too.

    As well as looking very thin, Catorze seemed to be moving around cautiously, as if his body were made of brittle glass about to snap. Cat Daddy commented that he looked like “a wizened old man”, and it was true. In fact, worse than that, his face looked like one of those shrunken heads that you get on display on fortune tellers’ shelves – not that I have actually been to any such fortune tellers, but you know the kind of thing I watch on TV.

    Anyway, I shouldn’t have worried because, the night before I had to go into school early to meet a student, the little sod snapped out of it. He was an utter pest all night, clambering all over me, headbutting me and screaming. Oh yes, full-on screaming; the gentle, closed-mouth whine which was his favoured communication during the night, is now a thing of the past.

    I even had a recurring dream that night about cats trapped atop a mountain and screaming to be rescued. In fact, there were no trapped cats: it was him. And the mountain was me.

    There is nothing wrong with him, and there never was. And, quite literally overnight, he lost that weird shrunken head look, started moving with more fluidity and became a normal* cat**.

    *By his standards.

    **Still subject to debate.

    What an absolute con artist he is, and how stupid I was to fall for his lies.

    The spring equinox is fast approaching. If he’s acting like he’s on amphetamines right now, what will he be like when his spring zing has fully kicked in?

    Bastard cat.

  • Des bonbons ou un sort?

    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:

    Ugh.

  • Un esprit venu sur terre

    Are you superstitious?

    I firmly believe that, if a black vampire cat comes your way, bad things will happen.

    Zoom in on his eyes. Go on, I dare you.

  • Pour devenir centenaire, il faut commencer jeune

    Write a letter to your 100-year-old self

    According to those charts which convert human years to cat years, Louis Catorze will be a hundred years old in 2031.

    (And I know that, when Cat Daddy reads this, he will say that Catorze looks a hundred years old right now.)

    “Geriatric”? Catorze prefers “Elder Statesman”, merci.

    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:

    “Bien joué, mon gars.”

    Very pleased with himself.

  • L’oreille est le chemin du cœur

    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.

  • Trop miauler fatigue les oreilles (Partie 2)

    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.

  • A tale of one kitty

    You’re writing your autobiography. What’s your opening sentence?

    “It was the worst of times.”

    He might, from his appearance, be the cat of Lucifer.

  • Trop miauler fatigue les oreilles

    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.

  • La révolte des anges

    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?

    CATaclysmic … CHÂTeau … hehehe.