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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.

  • Un inspecteur vous demande

    Do you need a break? From what?

    Come on. You know the answer to this.

    We have a school inspection going on at the moment. If you have ever worked in a school you will know what utter purgatory an inspection is, not just because of having people watch you teach (although that’s quite awkward and embarrassing) but because of the unbelievable amount of paperwork required. Most of it is either utter shite, or a duplication of other paperwork, or both.

    Also, the kids can’t be trusted not to show you up. One inspector came to my Spooky Club; when he asked a usually impeccably-behaved kid to explain what the club was all about, she replied, “It’s basically like a cult.” Saint Jésus.

    Anyway, when it’s inspection time at school, you want all other aspects of your life to be going normally and peacefully. It’s really not the best time for the following:

    1. Being clawed and stamped by a screaming cat when you’re trying to get your work done. It was so bad that I had to beg Cat Daddy to remove him and keep him contained elsewhere.

    2. Waking up to a dead mouse in the bedroom when you’re rushing off to work early.

    3. Nocturnal scampering which wakes me at 2:30am then, when I turn the lights on, Catorze is just sitting in the middle of the floor, with his tail neatly wrapped around his paws. Incidentally, this was not on the same night as the mouse, so we are yet to discover what he was chasing (and, more importantly, where it is).

    Cat Daddy asks me how each day went and looks after me when I come home, but all his efforts are cancelled out by a manic Catorze. I bet he’s been waiting since the last inspection to do all this.

    Bastard cat.

    Le Roi and his shadow self are ready to do their worst.

  • Ici pour un bon moment, pas longtemps

    In what ways do you communicate online?

    Mainly to share useless dross. Nothing constructive or admirable.

    Dog people, however, get to do THIS kind of thing (below). Social media has informed me that there is a Sausage Dog Meet-Up scheduled for Saturday 11th February.

    Before you tut at me for not anonymising names and faces, THIS IS A PUBLIC EVENT.

    It will be taking place in a park close by (not the one over the road, although that would have allowed me to observe from a window, giggling to myself, without even leaving the house), in honour of Daisy’s first birthday. And it has been created by a group called the London Lowriders; I have no idea who they are, but they sound like some sort of south supremacist gang.

    Daisy is, apparently, is a therapy dog. It sounds as if she has done a great deal in just one year, whereas Louis Catorze has been on the planet for almost FOURTEEN TIMES THAT LONG and has achieved the square root of bugger all.

    The last time I checked, there were eleven guests confirmed and one hundred and two interested. No doubt by the time the event takes place, more will have signed up. However, posting the event on a public setting has the potential to go a bit Project X*, non? What if two hundred sausage dogs turn up? Or two thousand?

    *Older followers: ask your kids/nieces/nephews who are in their early twenties.

    You’d be forgiven for thinking that there couldn’t possibly be that many sausage dogs living in the area, this is Richmond, sweetie. Sausage dogs are quite the upper-middle class accessory, just like Breton tops and jauntily-coloured wool blazers.

    If you have a dog, and you happen to be passing through TW10 on Saturday 11th February, I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t be turned away if you dropped into the event even if your dog isn’t a sausage dog. Dog people are like The Mob: they stick together.

    And if you have a Chat Noir, meet me and Catorze in the cemetery on Hallowe’en night. Which cemetery? Just follow the sound of the screaming.

    Catorze will probably leave early on account of the lack of men.

  • Les diodes lumineuses (Partie 3)

    I am lucky enough to run a paranormal club – nicknamed Spooky Club – at school. This is something that would terrify most headteachers and parents but, luckily, ours are progressive and trusting and let me get on with it. Our most recent session was about thermal cameras and the creepy things that show up on them.

    You can sense where this is going, non?

    I decided to tell my students about The Curious Incident with Chris the Heating Engineer on the Infra-Red Camera. They’re a cynical bunch and they think everything is Photoshop or Fake News, so I was ready for them to debunk my story with some sort of perfectly logical explanation.

    Kid 1: “What colour is your cat, Miss? And what colour is the floor?”

    Me: “Black cat, grey floor. Why?”

    Kid 1: “Oh, right. I was gonna say that if the cat and the floor were the same colour, maybe they’d absorb or reflect infra-red waves in the same way. But they’re not.”

    Kid 2: “Had the cat been outside, Miss?”

    Me: “Yes, but he’d been indoors for ten minutes at that point. So he should have warmed up.”

    Kid 2: “Maybe he was still cold from being outside?”

    Kid 3: “That still shouldn’t mean he was the same blue as the cold floor, though. If you’re showing up as blue on the camera, you’re basically dead.”

    Kid 4: “How long have you had your cat, Miss?”

    Me: “Nearly ten years.”

    Kid 4: “And is this the first time he’s done weird stuff?”

    [Silence, tumbleweed, crickets.]

    Anyway, after spending the rest of the session Googling pictures of cats on infra-red cameras to see if there were any that resembled what I saw on that fateful day (nope) and begging the headteacher to spend £2,000 on an infra-red camera so that they could mess about with it and attempt to recreate The Curious Incident (also nope), the kids concluded that, perhaps, Catorze was possessed and needed an exorcism. I already knew this anyway.

    Oh, and my colleague who teaches Physics confirmed that what I’d witnessed makes no scientific sense. I already knew this, too.

    A normal cat, as seen on an infra-red camera. (Picture from gst.ir.net.)
    My weird cat, with no effects or filters whatsoever.

  • In me didst thou exist

    What do you enjoy doing most in your leisure time?

    Louis Catorze is a huge fan of harassing the local wildlife. Squirrels, birds, foxes, whoever … they’re all fair game.

    These days, when I hear the cacophonous din of angry magpies or parakeets outside, I don’t even bother checking to see what’s happening. This is for the following reasons:

    1. I already know that it’s Catorze.

    2. He probably started it, so he’s getting exactly what he deserves.

    3. If it all turns to merde, he can handle himself.

    For whatever reason, when I heard said cacophonous din the other day, something compelled me to go and look. And, when I glimpsed that telltale black form on next door’s shed roof, I wasn’t surprised.

    Then I realised that it wasn’t Catorze.

    Now, I know that I may not have been wholly truthful in the past regarding his behaviour, when neighbours have reported disturbances. And I know that a previous record of lying withholding the truth may not make me a very reliable witness. But, Mesdames et Messieurs, this is not my cat. I can’t prove it, but THIS IS NOT MY CAT:

    “Hey! You!”
    “HEY! YOU!”
    “Don’t look away when I’m talking to you!”

    La chaussure is well and truly on the other pied now, because I am worried that this fine gentleman will be going around the neighbourhood causing havoc and people will think it’s Catorze. Or what if he DOESN’T go around the neighbourhood causing havoc and people think it’s Catorze? Maybe the magpie saw him on the bitter enemy’s territory* and thought, “There’s that annoying black cat again”? Magpies are supposedly able to pick out individual humans from the rest of the crowd, so they should be able to do the same with cats, non? Or am I thinking of crows, not magpies?

    Gaah. It’s all too much.

    *Technically this is Family Next Door’s territory but, as they don’t have any pets, Catorze has claimed it as his.

    For a short while the two Chats Noirs were in the garden together and, surprisingly, despite Catorze’s tolerance for impingers diminishing rapidly with age, he didn’t seem to mind him. But, as soon as I opened the back door to take a picture, the visitor ran off. Which is a shame as capturing the two together would have been indisputable proof that, honestly, this time it really WAS some other black cat.

    Will he (and it’s definitely a “he”, isn’t it?) be back? And will this be a beautiful friendship, or a war to end all wars?

    You see? SEE? Not my cat!

  • Les diodes lumineuses (Partie 2)

    After The Curious Incident with Chris the Heating Engineer on the Infra-Red Camera, but before my post about it went live, I told Cat Daddy what had happened. The first thing he did was fall about laughing. The second thing he did was tell me that he didn’t believe me.

    Darkness and light.

    Him: “So did Chris see it, too, then?”

    Me: “Yes. Ask him if you don’t believe me.”

    Him: “Did you get a photo of it?”

    Me: “No.”

    Him: “That’s a shame. It would’ve made a good blog post if you’d had the photo to back it up.”

    Me: “People will believe me, with or without the photo. They know that it’s too ridiculous to be made up.”

    Him: “I suppose we could ask Chris to put the infra-red on again when he comes back?”

    How bold of him to assume that Chris will come back. And, in the unlikely event that he does, and Catorze allows himself to be infra-redded again, what do you suppose will happen?

    1. The little sod will appear exactly as I described, with an ice-cold body and eyes of fire? (Nope.)

    2. The little sod will be utterly invisible, like a vampire in front of a mirror? (Possible.)

    3. The little sod will light himself up like the Eiffel Tower on Saint-Sylvestre, looking, for all the world, like a normal cat, just to spite me? (BINGO.)

    Oh. Mon. Dieu.

  • Un rendez-vous avec la gouvernante

    Louis Catorze’s three main bêtes noires are as follows:

    1. The guitar.

    2. The vacuum cleaner (although he’s more offended than scared by this, and he screams at whoever is using it to shut up).

    3. The pestle and mortar (again, insulting rather than frightening).

    The little sod was subjected to the third one at length last weekend, when I made red curry paste from scratch. But it was well worth it because I was making lunch for some very special pilgrims: one of them was the lady who managed Catorze’s, and his big brother Luther’s, adoptions to us.

    Cat Daddy, prior to the visit: “She’s got some explaining to do.”

    Me: “…”

    Him: “I mean, WHY US?”

    Me: “…”

    Him: “His online picture was very misleading. Just like those websites where the girls look amazing in their photos, and then you’re taken by surprise when you see them in the flesh.”

    Right. I’m not even going to ask.

    I gave Catorze a thorough brushing before his guests’ arrival so that he looked a bit less shit glossy and smart. And he seemed to know that something was afoot because he was extra unhinged that morning, screaming and staring creepily at us as we busied ourselves with food preparation and tidying up.

    Anyway, our friend was quite emotional seeing her toothy little ex-charge again, almost ten years after she found him his forever home. Catorze was very happy to see her, too, although, naturellement, he preferred her husband and his was the lap of choice.

    We swapped tales of rodents, birds and slugs – well, I say “swapped” but it was just us telling them our horror stories, whilst they thought, “Rather you than us!” And we barely even scraped the surface of the vast back catalogue of Catorzian misadventures. Their cats, Clementine and Puffin, are good girls who don’t do such things (well, give or take the odd worm and frog).

    Catorze pitter-pattered in and out throughout, chirping and trilling, and even jumped onto the dining table during lunch, to demand extra attention – right after we’d told our guests that he never did this. It’s a good thing that he is eating again, albeit reluctantly, because otherwise we would have made them take him back.

    Our hearts were fuller after a delightful afternoon talking cats. Le Royal Guest Book was, too, after one more message in it. And, whilst we don’t want to wish time away, our minds are already flashing forward to the summer, when we hope to visit Clementine and Puffin in their idyllic countryside retreat.

    Here is Sa Maj, having the time of his life with the (very well-chosen) catnip rainbow given to him by our guests. He is a very lucky boy indeed.

    “Pour moi?”
    Our friend was thrilled when she managed to capture The Fangs on camera.

    Here are three of the worst Catorzian stories – or, rather, three of the worst Catorzian stories SO FAR – which we shared with our guests on this day:

    1. The slug.

    2. The bird.

    3. The rat.

  • Ni manger, ni vivre

    If you could un-invent something, what would it be?

    Hot-smoked salmon. I’m not joking.

    We have had a trying few days here at Le Château. Since The Great Salmon Grab, every time I headed for the kitchen, Louis Catorze would pitter-patter after me and sit expectantly by his bowl, hoping beyond hope that some hot-smoked salmon would appear in it, or that Marcus Wareing would knock at the door and serve something fit for a Sun King.

    Neither of these things happened.

    The abject disappointment that ensued triggered the most mournful and gut-wrenching whining I had ever heard. When I filled his bowl with food, and he saw that it was disgusting Orijen slop and not Michelin-starred hot-smoked salmon, he would walk away.

    On one occasion, when I filled his bowl, I said, “You’d better not just walk away.”

    He didn’t; he RAN away. And I mean raced off at top speed, as if I had served him live scorpions.

    Cat Daddy: “He’s a ****. He won’t ****ing eat any of it. He wants salmon. And, God, that noise. That stupid ****ing whining noise.”

    Catorze, very quietly and sadly, and with the pitch starting high and finishing low: “Maooooou!”

    Cat Daddy, animatedly, pointing at Catorze: “Yes, THAT noise! I’m ****ing sick of it.”

    Friends even suggested just giving him the salmon, but I didn’t dare; Cat Daddy was already blaming me for this whole thing, firstly for “giving him the salmon in the first place” (this wasn’t quite how it happened, but tant pis) and then for not grabbing the plate away quickly enough and therefore “letting him think that the salmon was for him”, so it was probably best not to make things worse. However, he later added that, gram for gram, the salmon was probably still cheaper than the Orijen.

    After two days of hunger strike I was almost ready to take Catorze to the vet and beg for help, even though we had only recently been and the vet had confirmed that there was nothing wrong and he was just taking the piss*.

    *Not the actual words used by the vet.

    Then, suddenly and inexplicably, either the gods relented and decided to stop torturing us, or the planets shifted into a more auspicious alignment, or Catorze simply couldn’t be bothered to keep up the drama anymore, and SOMETHING happened. He just ate. Merci à Dieu: he ate. He didn’t eat much but, at this point, we didn’t care about quantity and were grateful for anything at all.

    So now we no longer have an anorexic cat, and Cat Daddy is about 0.1% less cross with me and Catorze. All is not quite fully well with the world, but this is better than the torment of the last few days.

    Communing with Satan to say, “How did I do, mon pote?”

  • La lecture nourrit l’âme

    What books do you want to read?

    I want Louis Catorze to finish reading this one. He’s only read half of it so far.

    “And 3am is Synchronised Parkour Time. All units, stand by.”

  • Le roi pêcheur

    What is your favourite animal?

    Not cats. Not anymore. Not after this.

    Bastard cat. I’m going to put him in an Uber and send him to someone’s house. I don’t know whose house. I don’t care whose house. It could be yours, so watch out.

    I came home on Wednesday night absolutely exhausted from work, and I was about to sit down and eat my dinner when I saw that Louis Catorze’s water was running low. So I put my plate on the coffee table, picked up his water glass and went to the kitchen to refill … and, when I returned, I was met with this absolute horror show:

    Saint Jésus.

    Now, before you berate me for leaving my food unattended, I have done so around 8,632 times in the past and Catorze has never behaved like this, not once. I used to joke to fellow cat freaks that I would put my dinner on the floor and leave the room, just because I could. However, those glorious days have clearly melted away like frost in the morning sun, and now we are never going to be able to trust the little sod around food again.

    This is a life-changing event at Le Château.

    “You stopped to take a picture?” Well, what would have been the purpose of whipping away the plate at this point? I certainly wasn’t going to eat the food after this (although Cat Daddy, who is cross with me for “wasting food”, says that he would).

    After he’d gorged himself on my dinner – hot-smoked salmon sourced from a fancy place which supplies high-end hotels and restaurants – Catorze was no longer interested in the boring Orijen that I’d just served him. He sniffed it, walked away, then sat on the stairs, looking pleased with himself, thinking about what he’d done and, no doubt, knowing that he’d do it again in an instant:

    The devil himself.

    My friend, when I told her about the incident: “What’s the moon doing right now?”

    The moon:

    Holy shit.

  • Le vieux chasseur

    Louis Catorze’s cat-cousins, Otis and Roux, have been having the time of their lives in the great outdoors.

    Otis recently caught his first mouse – or, rather, the first mouse of which we are aware. He brought it upstairs, chased it around whilst his parents slept, then took it back downstairs again. There, he waited patiently, holding the still-alive mouse in his mouth, until someone followed him, rescued the poor mouse from the jaws of death and set it free in the garden.

    My sister: “I don’t understand. The previous owners said that the cats didn’t hunt.”

    Me: “I feel your pain. I was also sold a non-hunter with Catorze, and what a joke that’s turned out to be.”

    Her: “Do you think this will get worse?”

    Me: “Well, if they’re managing to find mice in the depths of winter, spring and summer will be a veritable gold rush.”

    Her: “…”

    Me: “Not to mention the fact that Otis and Roux are barely even three …”

    Her: “…”

    Me: “So you have many, many years of mouse mayhem ahead of you.”

    Her: “…”

    Having successfully ensured that my sister would never sleep again, I breathed a sigh of relief that my own ageing cat will soon be hanging up his hunting gear and settling for a nice, easy life doing nothing.

    Oh, wait …

    Rodent Duty for Catorze, in the frost and ice.

    Whilst at work last week, I received the following message from Cat Daddy:

    “A present from him. He walked right past me with it. Dumped it on the floor in its death throes. Then licked the blood.”

    The message was accompanied by a highly disturbing video of Catorze, with rodent, utterly unrepentant. Don’t worry, I won’t be posting the full video here, but here’s a still taken from it, showing the little sod, smoking gun in hand:

    The mouse is out of sight, behind his head, but you can just about see its shadow.

    Why is he doing this? HOW is he doing this?

    Is he being so weird with his food because boring, dry biscuits just don’t compare to warm, pulsing rodent flesh?

    And what’s with the licking? Saint Jésus, THE LICKING?

  • Parler sans rien dire

    Cold, dry and bright days are my favourite kind: no sweat, no rain, and everything outside looks glorious. We were lucky enough to have had such a day last week so, naturellement, we had to ruin it by carrying a screaming cat through the park and paying £124 to be told that there’s nothing wrong with him.

    (Well, that sum of money was for a combination of the consultation, the steroid shot and the ruinously-expensive-but-joyously-infrequent flea, tick and double-arse-worm treatment. We didn’t pay the whole thing just for the advice, but you get what I mean, non?)

    On the way there, we saw a pretty tabby cat sitting on the roof of a neighbouring house. And, when we returned, we saw that she was still there:

    My stupid brain thought that the sun was casting a shadow next to her but, in actual fact, she was deep in telepathic communication with a tuxedo comrade:

    Putting the world to rights. THEIR world. Not ours.
    “Don’t forget, as soon as the clock hits 3am … PARKOUR!”

    When I shared the photo on my family’s WhatsApp group chat, my sister said, “Is that house in [name of street]?”

    Me: “Yes, that’s right. How did you know?”

    Her: “When we visited for Christmas, we walked past that same house and there were FOUR cats on that roof.”

    Oh. Mon. Dieu.

    Have we found the epicentre of The Mothership’s mysterious workings? Or are there many similar places around the world where her feline minions gather to telepathise? Please let me know if there has been any similarly suspicious feline activity in your neighbourhood.

  • Manger pour vivre

    What snack would you eat right now?

    Clearly nothing. Bastard cat.

    Cat Daddy and I can’t abide food waste. So it really hurts us to be throwing away perfectly edible Orijen – especially as it’s more expensive than cocaine and gold combined – just because a certain little shit doesn’t like the way we’ve served it.

    One of the benefits of Louis Catorze was that he didn’t have set mealtimes. So not only were we able to give him food if we were going out, knowing that he would happily eat it later when he was hungry, but we could tell chat-sitteurs to feed him when it suited them, not upon his command. However, if you’re having to pour boiling water onto his food, he doesn’t like it if it’s been left to soak in for ages. Once the food has absorbed too much water and gone soggy, he’s not interested.

    The obvious answer to this would be to feed him only when he looks hungry. I thought this was a pretty foolproof method when it came to minimising waste: just wait until he’s circling his plate like a hungry saltwater crocodile and screaming bloody murder, right? Well, so I thought … until he looked at my labour-intensive offering, sniffed it, walked away and went outside.

    He’d just been screaming for me to hurry up, SECONDS BEFOREHAND.

    Cat Daddy noticed the same thing, and wondered whether Catorze just liked to know before going out that there would be food there when he returned. I can’t imagine how any animal would have evolved to think this – after all, leaving food unattended in the wild would mean some impinger taking advantage, non?

    So now we can’t feed him if he’s not asking for food, nor can we feed him if he IS asking for food.

    We don’t understand this animal. Someone, please, help us out here.

    Weird little beast with Photoshop-effect alien eyes.

  • Garni de l’eau chaude

    This is the current status for each of us here at Le Château:

    Me: boiling a kettle in order to serve 0.3ml of boiling water to a cat.

    Cat Daddy: shouting at me for boiling a kettle for such a minuscule amount of water when there’s a global energy crisis.*

    Louis Catorze: enjoying his life of hot meals and chubbing up nicely, merci for asking.

    *It’s not great, but it’s better than running the hot tap for ages until it reaches the required temperature, non? And I make a cup of tea for myself from the same kettle of water, so as not to be wasteful. Yes, that’s right: even if I don’t really want a cup of tea at that moment, I have one anyway just to be able to tell myself that I haven’t put the kettle on just for my cat.

    Feeding Catorze is now quite the Herculean labour. Sometimes he sits by his plate, waiting patiently. At other times, he circles me like a hungry saltwater crocodile, screaming and screaming. And, of course, sometimes the pellets soak up too much water for Sa Maj’s liking, so we have to throw them away. But the little sod is eating, so we have, at least, achieved our objective.

    However, we can’t help wondering what on earth made him decide to stop eating normally in the first place.

    Are his teeth giving him trouble again?**

    Did he want hot food because it’s cold outside (and, if so, how did he know that going on hunger strike would do the trick)?

    Is he losing his sense of smell in his old age and finding that cold food just doesn’t have much scent-appeal, whereas hot food smells like a fine dining tasting menu?

    Is it an evolutionary thing, whereby hot food more closely resembles a freshly-killed mouse or rat (eurgh)?

    Was he bored of his food?

    Or did he just think, “I wonder what the pathetic humans will do if I starve myself?”?

    I shall await your suggestions as to which option might be correct …

    **UPDATE: a trip to the vet has confirmed that there is nothing wrong with his teeth.

    Hark! Is that the sound of a kettle boiling?

  • Même d’un bon chat, on attrape des puces

    Louis Catorze’s Broadline has been discontinued. It’s always stressful when this kind of thing happens because, when it comes to complicated cats like him, it’s not quite as simple as just replacing the discontinued item with something else.

    It’s already happened with his food, and with his bowl (well, ok, that wasn’t discontinued – I broke it), and what a saga it was each time. You’d think that, if a cat were hungry enough, they’d just eat. Nope. And you’d also think that, once they’d decided on their favourite food, they’d eat it from whatever serving vessel were provided. Also nope.

    Luckily there isn’t the option of accepting or not accepting a spot-on – the little sod has no choice – but I was all ready for a quest through every spot-on treatment in existence, with each one either burning holes in him, making his fur fall out, turning him into some hideous, mutated FrankenRoi or some other catastrophic eventuality that hadn’t yet occurred to me.

    The other factor is that Broadline treated both fleas and worms, so it’s imperative that any new treatment does the same, or better. Since Catorze is utterly unpillable and can even make pills disappear at will, it’s absolutely out of the question that I give him both a spot-on AND Greco a worming pill into him.

    By some miracle, the vet was able to recommend the perfect solution. Not only does it treat fleas, ticks and TWO types of arse-worm (although I could have done without finding out that there are two types of arse-worm), and not only is it a spot-on liquid and not a tablet, but it only needs to be applied once every three months. Once. Every. Three. Months.

    Naturellement there’s a catch: it’s excruciatingly expensive. But, for a treatment that is used so infrequently, no amount of money is too much. And, by the time Cat Daddy finds out the price, I will already have emailed the vet back and begged them to just take my money.

    All we need now is for Catorze to take to it, without any drama or unexpected twists. Ahem.

    Fleas in my bed? No, thank you.