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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.

  • Il pipistrello

    I am at my sister’s house for our traditional Halloweekend celebration of baking, crafting and horror films, whilst Cat Daddy has a lads’ weekend at Le Château with Louis Catorze.

    My sister has just discovered bats living in her maple tree and my nieces, aged seven and five, went absolutely … well … batshit upon seeing them. They were obsessed anyway following a twilight bat walk in a park in TW8 last year and bat-spotting in our garden during August’s Blue Moon, so to find them living in their own garden was just like unearthing buried treasure.

    We are now researching how to make a bat-friendly garden, and one of the tips given is, “Keep cats indoors”. Ahem. That said, I would be prepared to bet Le Château and all its contents on Catorze never catching a bat as long as he lives (and probably not making that much effort to try).

    Speaking of bats, after writing about Pipi the Bat Cat a few weeks ago, I received a number of requests for photos of him. His human brother was more than happy to oblige; just like me, he has about 8,983 photos of his cat on his phone and perhaps five of his human family members. And, if he runs out of space on his phone, no doubt he will delete the humans first.

    My favourite picture of them all is the last one, in which Pipi demonstrates his, erm, love for his dog-brother, Fulmine. Since he’s clearly an expert at that classic Hallowe’en cat pose with the arched back and the upright tail, I think Pipi needs an Official Hallowe’en Portrait, non?

    In fact, should it become our collective mission to ensure that every Chat Noir sits for an Official Hallowe’en Portrait?

    Gli amici.
    Il mondo dei gioCATtoli.
    La vita è bella.
    Colpito da un Fulmine.

  • La charge de la brigade féline

    I’ve just been looking after Blue the Smoke Bengal whilst his mamma was on holiday and, on the last day, the big sod brought me a mouse. I knew he was up to something because I could see him in the garden, with his head in the shrubbery and his tail swishing suspiciously. Then, when he came indoors, I could see the telltale little feet sticking out of his mouth.

    Worse yet, Blue was not giving up the mouse and kept darting away when I tried to grab it from him. Every time he set it down and went for his food bowl, I would make a move for it and he would double back and pick it up again.

    Eventually, after a comedic chase around the house, I managed to retrieve it and, as I left, I held it up to the Ring doorbell camera to inform Blue’s mamma of what her naughty boy had done.

    She later told me that hers was just a normal non-camera doorbell. So the people in the park across the road would have seen me holding up a dead mouse and talking to the door.

    Meanwhile, it seems that the fight with Goliath has revved up Louis Catorze, because he now wants to go out at The Front every night. And he requests this by racing to the shutters, sticking his silly head through and whining until someone opens the window.

    Cat Daddy often lets him out, and this was fine when we could see what he was up to; in the summer, Catorze used to sit happily on the window sill, surveying his fiefdom and causing no bother. However, now he disappears. We don’t know where he goes or what he does, and there’s no point in going out to check because there is never any sign of him. Any efforts to call him are just met with silence, tumbleweed and crickets.

    On a couple of occasions he‘s been gone for hours. I don’t like this at the best of times, but it makes me especially uncomfortable at this time of year. We don’t live in THAT kind of street but, given the choice, I would rather have him out at The Back than at The Front. And perhaps more of a worry than nasty people is the fact that it gets dark early and small black cats are invisible on the road.

    So I am officially declaring that The Front is out of bounds until further notice, and we will be keeping Catorze under especially strict surveillance on Hallowe’en. I will have to monitor Cat Daddy, too, due to his penchant for letting Catorze out and then forgetting whether or not he’s come back in. Last weekend, for instance, he’d had a few drinks and he swore blind that he’d seen Catorze at The Back. He hadn’t. Catorze had been out at The Front for two hours, having escaped when Dog Mamma and Dog Daddy left our house after dinner. And I was just about to start trawling the street looking for him, when he tapped on the window requesting to come in again.

    Whatever The Mothership seems to be telling them all right now, I don’t like it one bit. Oh God, and there’s a full moon just before Hallowe’en. Keep your enemies close and your cats closer, Mesdames et Messieurs.

    Little sod.
    Big sod.

  • L’art est une illusion

    Who are your favourite artists?

    There is a lot of art that I like. However, for me, there is a clear distinction between “I like looking at that” and “I would have that in my house”. Very few pieces manage both.

    Someone who DOES attain that holy grail of the shared segment in the Venn diagram is Mark S. Gagne, a Canadian artist who specialises in dark, folkloresque visions. Now, Mark has never met Louis Catorze, except perhaps in his nightmares, yet he somehow manages to capture his essence in many of his works, even those that don’t feature cats.

    I recently treated myself to a couple of his prints and, as you can see from this picture, Catorze approves. In this one, the fact that the black vampire cat has a levitating crown is very fitting … although, as a friend pointed out, to make it truly Catorzian the crown would say 666 instead of 9.

    Seems faintly familiar …

    (In numerology, the number 9 is said to signify “a humanitarian at heart; it is compassionate, kind, and intent on putting its efforts toward creating the greatest good”. So clearly the artist has a sense of humour as well as talent.)

    If you want to buy Mark S Gagne’s art, have look here. His website is well worth a visit at any time of year, but something about this month makes it a very pleasurable browse indeed.

  • Mon ring, c’est la rue

    On Friday evening Louis Catorze was badgering us to let him out at The Front, so Cat Daddy obligingly opened the window. This has happened many times before without incident but, on this occasion, Catorze poked his head through the open window, yowled and swished his puffy tail. And some unknown being outside was yowling back.

    Saint Jésus.

    When he looked outside, Cat Daddy saw that it was Goliath, that massive ginger cat with whom Catorze has had at least one altercation (to our knowledge). And, as we debated whether or not we should pull him back inside and close the window, he shot out.

    Catorze on the left, Goliath on the right, me in the middle not knowing what to do with myself. (Picture from idn.com.)

    I was concerned that our neighbours would hear the horrendous racket and come out to see what was going on (yes, it’s happened before), so I decided to try and recapture Catorze. By the time I’d put on my shoes and gone outside, he had positioned himself on one side of the road, with Goliath, three times his size, having run away from him (!) to the other side, and the pair of them were staring each other down like boxers, yowling up a storm. I approached Catorze, but the little shit ran underneath Family Next Door’s car where he knew he wouldn’t be caught.

    The yowling continued. And, because the street was empty, the sound echoed like a peal of bells, in the most embarrassing fashion imaginable.

    At that point, my options were as follows:

    1. Wriggle on my belly underneath the car to grab my screaming cat, risking not only personal injury and failure but also being captured doing so on Family Next Door’s Ring doorbell camera.

    2. Leave the cats to it, go back indoors, turn up the television to drown out the God-awful sound and prepare to trot out the “It must have been some other black cat” line, if anyone asked.

    Since I didn’t really want Family Next Door gathering around a laptop screen and watching that video with their popcorn, I went for option 2.

    The little sod rolled back about half an hour later and we let him in through the window. And, within a few minutes, he was battering at the shutters to go out again. It was a firm, hard NON to that. In fact, if this is the kind of caper that we can expect when we let him out at The Front, it’s going to be a firm, hard NON to it for the foreseeable future.

    I shall say it again: he is a senior cat who should be taking it easy. Why is he like this?

    Now all I can do is await the comments on our local neighbourhood forum: “What a disturbance. I thought this was a nice neighbourhood. [Anonymous]”

    Ivan Drago.
    Roi-cky Balboa.

  • Y a-t-il quelqu’un dans la salle?

    So … cats and séances. You probably won’t like the idea of your sweet little kitty communing with evil spirits, but they’re all at it. It’s not just the black vampire cats, although blackness and vampirism do somewhat increase the chances of evil doings. (Don’t ask me how I know this.)

    If cats are in a group, the pack mentality takes over and they all whip each other up into a spooky frenzy, as my friend Dawn’s cats did (below). Dobby, the large ginge, was clearly the one who hatched the plan, with Ollivander, the tabby with the white toes, happily following suit and Neville, the pinstripe tuxedo, being somewhat reticent yet not exactly going out of his way to avoid trouble, either. Sorry, Nev, but, unless you are actively anti-demon, you are still complicit.

    Nothing to see here.

    At the moment that this photo was taken, they had just been caught out and Dobby was gasping, “Oh shit, it’s Mum!” But it was too late for Dawn; as we can see, they had already succeeded in summoning the Antichrist, aka Jasper, the black kitten rising from their witch board. And, once the Antichrist has been summoned, it’s impossible to get rid of him. (Don’t ask me how I know this, either.)

    If you only have one cat, regretfully you are still not in a spook-free zone; it seems it’s perfectly possible to form a coven of just one. I caught Catorze mid-ouija earlier this year, a couple of nights before a full moon. If he can do this in February at a time when he was supposed to be convalescing and taking it easy after his dental surgery, I dread to think what he does on long October nights when he’s at peak psycho.

    Nothing to see here, either. Move along, s’il vous plaît.

    As we count down towards the spookiest night of the year, you don’t want to mess with cats, whatever their colour. It’s like trying to take on the Mafia; life is easier if you just pretend you didn’t see anything.

    Ollivander fun fact: he’s from Puerto Rico so his first language is Spanish. He is also fluent in ignoring English.
    Neville fun fact: he was found as a stray when his now-mamma was searching for Ollivander, who’d gone missing. No doubt the little sods planned it.
    Dobby fun fact: he is the meatiest and cuddliest of the bunch.
    Jasper fun fact 1: he was being offered free of charge, at a market, just before Hallowe’en. Luckily his now-mamma took him and ensured that he would be safe.
    Jasper fun fact 2 (yes, he gets two as he’s the Chat Noir): he has lots to say … whether or not you want to hear it.
    The boys are still dabbling in the occult and, as you can see, they are summoning larger demons these days.

  • La poésie en images

    What skill would you like to learn?

    I have recently joined a Smart phone photography social media group. People post their original shots versus the edited versions, and everyone compares the two and tells them whether they’ve gone a bit overboard or got the balance right.

    People mainly post landscapes and human portraits in the group, but recently there have been more and more cats. There was even one cat pictured DURING A VET VISIT, who sat perfectly still and whose photo was blade-sharp and blur-free.

    I am always impressed by people’s editing skills, but I’m more amazed that they can get their little sods to sit still. I can’t.

    Every so often I post saying, “This is what I managed with Louis Catorze”, accompanied by a picture of an indistinct black haze or a glimpse of his arse end walking away. This makes me the funniest person in the group but also by far the worst photographer

    The fact that my Catorzian photography hasn’t improved in nine years, and the fact that not even a Smart phone photography group can help me, don’t bode well considering that it’s October and I still haven’t managed an Official Hallowe’en Portrait.

    I have the perfect props: some giant home-grown pumpkins gifted by Cat Daddy’s friend Mike. And I have the perfect subject matter: a black cat with vampire teeth. But it’s not working. Each picture is more shit than the last, because the subject matter either doesn’t want to play or just wants to annoy me (or possibly a bit of each).

    My only hope is that, since Catorze behaves for other people, one of his many October visitors will manage to take a good picture. But at least his weird bald patch is disappearing back to whichever strange dimension from which it came. So that’s something. (I’m reaching for any positive that I can find, to be honest.)

    Me: “Will we EVER get a decent Official Hallowe’en Portrait from him?”

    Cat Daddy, without looking up from his phone: “When the sun freezes over, maybe?”

    No.
    No.
    Dear God, no.
    I give up.

  • Le chat féerique

    What is your favourite special occasion? Why is it your favourite?

    Since we share a house with a black cat with vampire teeth, it’s practically compulsory to love Hallowe’en. And Hallowe’en isn’t a day: it’s a season. And that season started on 1st October (with pre-season having taken place throughout the whole of September).

    We have always known that Louis Catorze isn’t just a normal cat, and we change our minds every day about whether he could be an alien, a demon, a cryptozoological freak of nature yet to be discovered by science, or a combination of all three. But I now wonder if he might be a Cat Sìth.

    No, I haven’t misspelled one of Cat Daddy’s Unrepeatable Expletives; a Sìth – pronounced “shee” – is a generic term used to describe a fairy creature of Celtic myth and legend. And a Cat Sìth is believed to appear in the form of (obviously) a cat. Guess what colour? Go on, I bet you’ll never guess.

    The idea of Catorze being of fairy origin makes absolute sense. Although he has a feline silhouette, his vampire fangs and his exaggerated manga eyes make him look like something from a fantasy illustrator’s sketch book (the rough, tea-stained drafts that were discarded, obviously, not the polished final design). Other animals seem to be aware of this, because creatures who would, ordinarily, finish him in a fight – foxes, larger cats and the like – run away from him. He chases and eats spiders and flies, yet knows to leave bees alone. Does he recognise them as his allies?

    Catorze is highly sensitive to the phases of the moon, putting extra vigour into his nocturnal parkour in the run-up to a full moon. I have a moon phases app which I barely check these days, because I can tell by his behaviour if a bad moon is rising. He can teleport silently – usually to places we don’t want him to go – yet also stomp forcefully across our floorboards when the mood takes him, sounding like an adult human. This is especially unnerving when it’s the middle of the night and I’m home alone. (Yes, we do warn our chat-sitteurs about this.)

    If you’d like to read more about the Cat Sìth, have a look here. But this photo alone should be enough to convince you that our little sod is not of this world:

    There’s something weird about him.

  • Soyez sympa, rembobinez

    What’s your favourite word?

    Cat Daddy has several favourite words. Very few of them can be repeated in polite company. Yet, yesterday morning, I heard a torrent of them flowing from the kitchen, interspersed with feline screaming.

    Cat Daddy had switched on the television, started watching the golf, and rewound the live broadcast to catch up on the bits that he’d missed. However, Louis Catorze had then stepped onto the remote control and changed channels. When Cat Daddy switched back to the golf, it had finished and he was no longer able to rewind, on account of the channel change.

    Cat Daddy: “He’s ****ing ****ed everything up now. What a **** he is.”

    Catorze: “Mwah!”

    Cat Daddy: “Bastard cat.”

    Catorze: “Mwah!”

    This is just the beginning of post-steroid Catorze’s pre-Hallowe’en shenanigans. I can’t quite bring myself to tell Cat Daddy that it can, and will, only get worse.

    Catorze is well and truly up for it. Whatever “it” may be.

  • Les malheurs et les jumeaux ne viennent jamais seuls (Partie 2)

    Puppy Mamma and Puppy Daddy had twins last year. So their household now consists of two grown-ups, two babies, Nala the dog AND Gizzy the [insert name of species].

    Louis Catorze loves kids but isn’t a fan of babies; he’s met a couple in the past and is confused by them. The minute they see him and they let out that excited screech, his ears flatline and he’s off.

    Other cats? Dogs? Foxes? Bring ‘em on.

    Babies? C’est un grand NOPE.

    Naturellement, considering all of the above, we thought it would be fun see how Catorze would get on with two of them.

    The encounter had the potential to fail abysmally but, to our astonishment, the little sod was great with each kid individually. He lay and meowed gently as Twin 1 rubbed his bare feet on his fur. Twin 2 cried when she saw Catorze – we’ve all been there, so we can relate – but, when she realised that he wasn’t a monster and eventually settled, he contentedly flicked his tail across her legs and feet as she gently stroked him with one finger.

    A tail-hug for Twin 2.

    (With normal cats, tail-flicking is a bad sign. But Catorze does it when he’s happy. Yes, we know that this is really weird, but it’s still one of the less weird things about him. Sometimes, when he doesn’t want to be on a lap but still wants to feel close to a human, he will lie close by and flick his tail repeatedly onto the human’s arm or leg to remind himself that they’re still there.)

    Both babies at the same time, unfortunately, proved to be a step too far: when Twin 1 and Twin 2 sat on either side of him, Le Roi made his excuses and left. However, I was impressed that he even made it that far.

    Next step: posing for a very special Official Hallowe’en portrait together? Can we make it happen?

  • L’appel de la forêt

    What things give you energy?

    This kind of thing DRAINS me of energy. Will that do?

    I can hear cat fight sounds coming from the Zone Libre right now. Now, most cat owners would immediately rush to intervene if they found themselves in this situation, but not me.

    Firstly, I know that Louis Catorze can handle himself. But the main reason is because it’s broad daylight, and if any of my neighbours see me going to check, it will be a sign of guilt; if I don’t do it, I may be able to get away with pretending I didn’t bother to look because I KNEW it was some other cat, in the event of being asked about it later.

    So I shall just sit tight until it stops, and wait for Catorze to pitter-patter indoors without so much as a whisker out of place. I hope the other cat fares as well.

    EDIT: He came in minutes after I finished writing this, looking exactly as described above, then creepy-stared for food and promptly went back out again.

    Looking for more trouble.

  • Le api italiane

    On Saturday, Cat Daddy invited two of his friends over for lunch. I hadn’t met them before but, since they were coming all the way from Italy just to watch our football team, I was pretty sure that I’d like them.

    As soon as they arrived, Louis Catorze came pitter-pattering down the hallway. Our guests – yes, they were both men, merci for asking – stopped in their tracks and exclaimed, “A black cat!”

    Oh dear, I thought. Not a good start. But their surprise wasn’t dismay but DELIGHT, because they have a black cat who looks exactly like Catorze. Startlingly so, in fact. Their cat apparently has “lots of names” but the latest one is Pipi, short for “pipistrello”, the Italian word for “bat”. (We refrained from mentioning the many names that Cat Daddy has for Catorze, none of which are repeatable in polite company.)

    Then, before I knew it, Cat Daddy had told his friends all about Le Blog and had produced Catorze’s guest book for them to sign.

    Now, when I meet new people, I like to keep most of my cat freakishness concealed until I know that they will respond favourably (and I regard any reaction that isn’t backing away in horror as “favourable”). So I was quite mortified to have all this laid out within an hour of our guests’ arrival. Astonishingly, seemed to absorb it as if it were perfectly normal, although they did add that, in Italy, guest books were “for museums, maybe weddings, but not cats”.

    During lunch, our guests told us about a town called Vicenza, whose inhabitants are historically rumoured to eat cats. Apparently if you want to insult someone from this town, all you have to do is call them a “mangia gatti” (“cat-eater”). Most normal cats probably wouldn’t like this kind of talk. But Catorze was so happy to be photographed and stroked by new male friends that he didn’t care … or perhaps he knows that nobody would bother trying to eat him because there’s only enough meat for a couple of tiny bits of antipasti.

    Our visitors signed Catorze’s book before they left. They also mooted the idea of a guest book for their cat, which Le Roi thinks is a great idea. In fact, he says it’s the absolute MINIMUM that any human should do for their cat.

    Getting spruced up for his next set of guests.
    Ahem.

  • Ce teint d’automne

    It’s autumn. If you have been following Le Blog for any length of time, you may have noticed that I like autumn. A LOT.

    The air isn’t quite as crisp and autumnal right now as I’d like, but the summer humidity is no more (thank goodness), and most normal cats might be starting to retreat indoors and power down. Louis Catorze, however, still has his clock set to CST (Catorzian Summer Time) and is gadding about outside, goading the foxes (yes, we’ve actually SEEN him doing this) and so on. And he’s still mousing. When we came back from our weekend away, we found another one.

    Oh, and when he comes indoors, he wants to play.

    King of the autumnal garden.

    My early mornings are now all about waving a pink butterfly on a string whilst a manic vampire cat chases it. Catorze is having the time of his life. Meanwhile, I am sweating, puffing and bleeding from the eyeballs in my pathetic efforts to keep up with him. It’s quite the departure from my once-gentle and serene introduction to the day, watching the sunrise, reading a book and sipping green tea.

    Here is Catorze, having just bounced and landed, very appropriately, right under the watchful gaze of Count Dracula. Look at that flailing, mischievous tail:

    He’s ready for the Spooky Season. But is it ready for him?

  • Être magnifique à treize ans

    Cat Daddy and I are still reeling from the butchery that took place during our absence. To add insult to injury, far from being contrite, Louis Catorze didn’t show his face for a good hour or two after our return. We even wondered whether the chat-sitteur had taken him with her, but then we realised how silly that was because why on earth would she want to? Why would ANYONE want to?

    We searched the house and garden for him and failed to find him. We did, however, find another dead mouse.

    Meanwhile, if you’re stuck for what to wear in the transition period that is late summer to early autumn, why not stick with your usual black and accessorise with a contrasting cobweb earring?

    Each piece is individually foraged by the wearer, so no two look exactly alike. Here is this season’s subtle but classy concept piece, modelled by Catorze:

    Coco Chanel would be proud.
    It’s just as attractive from a distance.

  • The Brentford Cat Claw Massacre

    Cat Daddy and I are away at the moment, and the same chat-sitting friend who looked after Louis Catorze in July is looking after him again.

    This Geordie cat screamed at us from across the road. We were late meeting our friend, but we had to stop and stroke her.

    We went away utterly unconcerned and full of confidence that everything would go well; after all, one of the good things about Catorze is that, despite being a massive shite for us, he behaves for other people.

    Or so we thought.

    First of all, there was this (which, incidentally, took place just an hour after the chat-sitteur’s arrival):

    Not great but not a surprise either.

    Then there was this:

    Saint Jésus, Marie et Joseph, et le petit âne.

    Note how polite she was being by saying “Louis or a friend” so as not to jump to conclusions.

    He doesn’t have any friends. It was him.

    After the initial shock had worn off, I requested photographic proof of the slaughter – not because I disbelieved what I’d been told but, rather, because I needed to see the full horror in order to reconcile it in my own head. Needless to say I wish I hadn’t asked, because it was an absolute bloodbath. There were three definite mice, along with a fourth, erm, thing which was either a butchered baby mouse or half an adult mouse. If the latter, we still don’t know where the other half is.

    Oh. Mon. Dieu.

    After directing our chat-sitteur to our supply of plastic bags, and instructing her to dispose of the hapless victims/pieces in the park bin across the road, Cat Daddy and I had a stiff drink and wondered how and why this could have happened. Catorze has never – NEVER – killed multiple mice in one night. He also only very rarely leaves them outside, preferring, instead, to leave them at the bottom of the stairs to be stepped on, or to bring them upstairs to our bedroom. Obviously we are glad that neither of those happened.

    We are setting off back home later today, and we have no idea how we will bring ourselves to cuddle our cute, fluffy kittenalike knowing what he’s just done. We also don’t know how we will face the chat-sitteur again, but avoiding her for the rest of our lives might be tricky given that she, erm, lives just down the road.

    Bastard cat.