louiscatorze.com

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.

  • L’aventure n’en vaut pas la peine

    Share a story about the furthest you’ve ever travelled from home.

    Our part of west London was in the news last week, due to an inmate who absconded from Wandsworth prison. After much fuss and police helicopters hovering through the night, he was finally recaptured in, erm, Chiswick. Had I known he’d be there, I might have wandered down to look out for him, in the hope of scooping the £20,000 reward money.

    Wandsworth and Chiswick are about six miles apart. I think even without the army survival training and insider help that this bloke had had, I’d have been able to make it further than that after four days on the run. In fact, even Louis Catorze, with his short legs, could have made it further than that (probably by slipping unnoticed into an Ocado van).

    If you have an outdoor cat without a tracker, it’s impossible to know where they really go. However, the furthest that Catorze has been, to our knowledge, is the far side of the park over the road. After one of my surgeries (I don’t recall which one because I’ve had that many), the surgeon prescribed a short, supervised recovery walk every day, and laps of the park were a good way of monitoring my progress. So we set off one evening, and Catorze decided to escape out at The Front as we left and followed us, screaming.

    Looking back, we should have recaptured him and locked him back up again but, like most escaped convicts, he’s impossible to recapture if he doesn’t want to be recaptured. Plus we didn’t think he would actually follow us all the way across the road and through the park.

    He did.

    By the time we’d reached the far side of the park, we had resigned ourselves to the fact that, for our first lap, at least, we would be pursued by a screaming cat. However, we didn’t quite make a full lap together because a dog walker then appeared, with two dogs running free, off the lead.

    The dogs scampered up to Catorze and, for a second, I actually felt my soul leave my body as I prepared to jump in and save him from the ensuing carnage. Despite all his bravado with dogs when he’s on his own turf, Catorze decided that a confrontation outside the safe confines of the Zone Occupée and the Zone Libre (all Catorzian territory) was a step too far and he was off, hurtling back home at breakneck speed, with the dogs deciding NOT to give chase. We then finished our lap at equally breakneck speed so that we could let him back into Le Château.

    Me: “That was negligent of us. We should never have let him follow us. We were lucky that the dogs and the owner were nice.”

    Cat Daddy: “It’s fine. Cats go into parks all the time.”

    They absolutely do not. I can count on two fingers the number of cats I’ve seen in parks in my entire life.

    I’d like to say that Catorze learned his lesson after that, but he didn’t (either because he’s so thick that he forgot, or because he just doesn’t care). He still yearns for far-flung adventures at The Front and is always trying to escape out. And if it were up to The Fun Parent (Cat Daddy), he’d be there all the time.

    Luckily The Boring Parent (me) is at hand to rein things in and spoil the party. It’s a hard NON to anything that might involve marauding dogs.

    Just stick to The Back, little sod.

  • Je ne me sens coupable de rien

    What was the last thing you searched for online? Why were you looking for it?

    The last thing I Googled was “Is my cat a psychopath?”

    The reasons are pretty obvious. And the sheer number of results indicates that others have clearly been there before me (with their own cats, I mean, not with mine), although they all seem to be about listing signs and none of them really help us to break free of our entrapment.

    It’s great that I’m not alone. But it’s terrifying that living under their rule seems to be an international habit, with them treating us like dirt and us letting them.

    “Signs of a Psychopath” is my latest Discovery Plus treat. This show, whose content is exactly as it sounds, may appear to have no place on a blog about cats but, if you know Louis Catorze, you can most likely imagine the direction in which this post is going.

    Whether or not someone you know qualifies as a psychopath rather depends on where you look; sources cite checklists of anywhere between four and forty (!) signs to look out for. But these seem to be common throughout:

    1. Superficial charm.

    2. High intelligence (just hear me out).

    3. Pathological egocentricity.

    4. Manipulative behaviour.

    5. Parasitic lifestyle (Cat Daddy nodded very emphatically when I told him about this one).

    6. Callous lack of regard for humanity.

    7. History of behavioural problems.

    Louis Catorze ticks six of the above seven boxes. I’m sure you can figure out the anomalous one.

    Here he is, pretending to be cute. Don’t believe him:

    Lies, lies and more lies.

  • Mon esprit en feu, mon âme en feu

    On Saturday it was the hottest day of the year in the U.K., beating the record which was set, erm, the previous Thursday.

    Cat Daddy and I absolutely hated it, and cursed all the people who complained about the short-lived summer (yes, the heatwave is YOUR FAULT). But, for Louis Catorze, it was business as usual, and the poor little sod couldn’t understand why I didn’t want him on my lap. Likewise, I couldn’t understand why he DID want to be on my lap. So it was a day of cluelessness and misery all round.

    We have, of course, read lots of advice regarding keeping cats cool during a heatwave: multiple water stations*, that kind of thing. However, following the success of his advice on how to upend a bin bag, Catorze would like to offer his own tips for dealing with a heatwave. No, none of them make logical sense. But then nothing about him ever does.

    *We tried this with him during the last heatwave. He used his extra stations a grand total of 0 (zero) times.

    1. Sleep in the part of the garden that traps the sun all day:

    The shade is, in fact, my shadow whilst taking this photo. So not real shade at all.

    2. Head for the hottest room in the house:

    Why?

    3. Snuggle up on a woollen cushion, underneath a fluffy winter blanket:

    Also why?

    If you are able to do all of the above whilst also drinking no water whatsoever, letting yourself shrivel into a dry husk that crumbles to dust when the wind blows your way, extra kudos to you.

    Please, no more freak heatwaves. We want crisp air and pretty leaves and morning mist and pumpkins. PLEASE.

  • Fortissimo, con energia

    Cat Daddy and I have booked a course of music theory classes with our guitar teacher, to supplement our guitar lessons. We’ve just attended a Zoom taster session, with a view to starting the full set of classes properly the week after next.

    As you are aware, Louis Catorze is an utter pest on Zoom calls. However, since it was a warm evening and there was mischief to be had outside, we were quite confident that he would have better things to do than annoy us.

    He didn’t.

    The little sod appeared during a very quiet part of the proceedings, when the teacher had put a piece of sheet music on the screen and we were all supposed to be working out the note values in silence.

    Me, in my head: “Oh dear God, no.”

    Catorze jumped onto the sofa and walked across me and past the screen to his papa’s lap, screaming himself senseless.

    Me, out loud: “Oh dear God, no.”

    Luckily we were all on mute, so nobody heard him. However, because Cat Daddy was wearing a white* shirt, it was very obvious to everyone on the call that there was a black cat clambering all over one of us, whilst the other was in fits of giggles. You didn’t need volume to figure all that out.

    *Cat Daddy absolutely NEVER wears a white shirt. It’s as sure as night follows day that his shirt will be dark. If he had done as he normally does, it would have been much easier to conceal the marauding Catorzian form from everyone else on the Zoom call.

    The worst part of it was that Steve, our guitar teacher’s massive ginger cat, sat beautifully behind his Cat Daddy during the session and didn’t make a sound. So cats CAN behave during Zoom calls, if they want to. Ours just doesn’t want to.

    The last part of our lesson involved playing our guitars**. Catorze can’t stand the sound, so off he went. And, as soon as our lesson ended, the foxes started their stomach-churning, unearthly shrieking in the Zone Libre, and Catorze couldn’t resist going out to investigate.

    **Sorry to Family Next Door and all our other neighbours; “House of the Rising Sun” has probably been the ruin of many an evening and weekend, thanks to us.

    We now have a problem to resolve before the full course starts. Suddenly that lead-lined underground vault is no longer just a joke that I make.

    His face shows exactly what he thinks of our guitar playing.

  • Où est Le Roi?

    Louis Catorze wasn’t on my bed when I woke up a couple of mornings ago. I went downstairs, made my usual pot of green tea and read my book, but there was a cat-shaped space on my lap where Catorze would ordinarily be. This was highly unusual.

    When I took a cup of tea up to Cat Daddy, I asked him whether he’d seen Catorze. He hadn’t. And, even though I ought to know better, my mind played every horrible scenario imaginable, with a particularly unpleasant one taking centre stage.

    This was it:

    These chaps live in the Zone Libre.

    Cat Daddy and I drank our tea, listening out for the telltale “Ba-doomph” of Catorze’s preposterously loud feet on the floorboards. But there was nothing. The only sound we could hear was a magpie going absolutely ballistic outside.

    Just as we had decided to get out of bed, the little sod appeared, screaming himself senseless. And, as if by magic, the magpie fell silent at the same time. Coincidence?

    Catorze has given us so many false alarms (this one was the worst one) and we still don’t seem to have learned our lesson. I shall keep repeating the following mantra until it’s imprinted on my brain:

    “WE MUST NOT WORRY ABOUT SA MAJ UNTIL HE HAS BEEN MISSING FOR AT LEAST THREE DAYS, OR UNTIL A NEIGHBOUR REPORTS A DISTURBANCE, WHICHEVER COMES FIRST.”

    Nooo! Leave the bee alone!

  • La souffrance est un bon professeur

    Why do you blog?

    You know when you’re the victim of a covert, gaslighting bully, and your friends say, “Document every single incident”?

    Yeah. That.

    The bully.

  • Le téléphone portable est un signe extérieur de détresse

    How are you feeling right now?

    Ah, the joys of buying a new phone and seamlessly swapping all your shit over from the old one.

    Well, when I say “joys”, I mean the opposite. And when I say “seamlessly”, I mean the opposite of that, too. Anyone who has ever upgraded their phone will know exactly how I feel right now.

    For whatever reason, the magical transfer method where you hold one phone above the other and the fizzy mist takes care of everything*, didn’t work. So I had to do it all manually. And, after a few skirmishes and having to reset every single password I have ever had, the only thing from which I remained firmly barred was Le Blog.

    *I’m not making this up. The data-transferring fizzy mist is an actual thing. IT’S INCREDIBLE.

    Oui, Mesdames et Messieurs, you have read that correctly: I successfully managed to access the scammers’ delights that are my bank account and my PayPal, but Le Blog was not happy with me for attempting to log on using a new device.

    (Oh, and I couldn’t phone anyone, either, nor could anyone phone me, but I didn’t really care about that. I’m one of those people who will watch the phone ring in my hand, then WhatsApp the person to say, “What do you want?”)

    This prompted me to wonder what people might think if they didn’t hear Louis Catorze’s antics for a while? The most logical conclusion, of course, would be that the little sod had killed and eaten me, but how much time would elapse before you started to worry?

    In the likely event of me still being alive when he started to eat me from the feet up, and the somewhat less likely event of me being able to send out a brief SOS on another social media platform before he managed to chew off my texting fingers, would this trigger the required emergency response? Or is this kind of thing just standard Catorze?

    Eventually, through an arduous process with labyrinthine twists and turns too complicated to mention, I was able to successfully gain entry to the Promised Land of WordPress or JetPack or whatever it is. And it has since dawned on me that, if I wanted to signal for help, I would have to post something like, “I’m so lucky to have such an impeccably-behaved cat who always does as he’s told.” If people read those words, they would know that the end of the world was nigh.

    Well, either that, or they’d think I had a new cat.

    He’s letting me live (for now).

  • Le chasseur du scarabée

    When it comes to hunting, Louis Catorze commits to it for a few days, then does nothing for months. This is both good (it’s not a daily occurrence) and bad (just when we think he’s grown too old for it, we have the shock of another headless mouse with the blood drained from its body).

    The following took place some time ago but, as ever, I didn’t have a chance to post it in real time due to the copious amounts of other nonsense taking place:

    1. Strikingly pretty metallic emerald beetle gets caught in spider web.

    2. Much smaller spider approaches, then clearly thinks, “Merde: how am I going to eat this thing?”

    3. The pair of them tussle, whilst Catorze looks on.

    4. Beetle manages to wriggle free of web. Catorze continues to watch.

    5. Beetle falls off fence and into gap behind bench.

    6. Catorze decides that now is the time to try and reach it, despite having been in a perfect position to do so before (and done nothing whatsoever about it).

    7. Mission aborted. Well, not so much aborted as, erm, never actually begun in the first place.

    8. Catorze recovers from his failure and goes back to having cuddles with his beloved papa.

    Oh, Catorze, an apex predator you are not. Ok, so he may have caught a few mice last month, but this doesn’t makes him a hunter any more than going for a run makes me a runner.

    Well, Louis Catorze? Aren’t you going to …
    … oh, forget it.

  • Un nouvel ami?

    Our Cat-Disliking Friend came for dinner again at the weekend. And, since he has just moved to the area permanently, I expect we will be seeing more of him.

    When I told him about Le Blog, and about the fact that refer to him as Cat-Disliking Friend, he revealed that he does actually like individual cats, and finds them “soothing” company, but just doesn’t like it when they shit in his garden. When I reminded him that at least cats have the grace to bury it, and that not only do we have to pick up after dogs but they roll around in fox shit*, he agreed that maybe cats weren’t so bad after all. Although he wasn’t able to explain exactly who these soothing cats were, and where I might find them. I think there might have been a sighting of one somewhere in 2018 but … does anyone know for sure?

    *When Catorze’s sparring partner Oscar the dog was around, Dog Mamma would tell us the most awful fox shit stories. If you don’t know about dogs and the things they get up to with fox shit, you have dodged a bullet.

    When CDF arrived, after considering whether to be aloof or obsequious, Louis Catorze eventually settled for, erm, full-on aggressive. For twenty minutes there was purring, headbutting and rolling so intense and relentless that I occasionally wondered if I should intervene (but I didn’t bother because it was funny). Then the little sod spotted movement in the area under the bird feeder, and went to assume the position for Rodent Duty.

    He then spent the rest of the evening out at The Front, popping in occasionally through the open window to put his front paws on CDF’s legs and scream in his face. CDF would stroke him and say, “What do you want?” Mon gars, it’s been nine years and we still don’t know.

    Overall, I think Catorze had it right in terms of the balance of “I’m going to annoy the merde out of you” and “Whatever, couldn’t give a merde”, whilst also ensuring that he didn’t miss out on man-love. Bien joué, Le Roi.

    Whilst on their second bottle of wine (although the first was a magnum so, really, it was their third), the gentlemen mooted the idea of creating a Dark Web version of Le Blog, run by Cat Daddy. The following topics were mentioned for publication:

    1. “What I REALLY think” (I can’t say I like the sound of this, whatever it might mean).

    2. “Click here if you want any of Catorze’s leftover Gabapentin” (the fact that CDF wanted to take up this offer should, in itself, be a worry).

    How do you feel about the idea of Le Dark Blog? Can you think of any material that you would like to see? Or do you think it’s an absolutely terrible idea which should never see the light of day?

    Ugh. I know what dogs do on pavements.

  • Où sont mes poils?

    Merde, merde and thrice merde: it’s back. And I managed to make it a whole lot worse when I brushed Louis Catorze:

    There is a primary one and a secondary one this time.

    Cat Daddy is cross with me for brushing him. But we can’t just stop doing it, since Catorze’s skin allergy issues are so much better when he’s regularly brushed. Plus I didn’t just brush that one spot (obviously); the fur came off from all over.

    We really don’t know what to do now. In the past even the vet has been at a loss. No doubt there are tests and biopsies and whatever else that we could do to find out more, but Catorze isn’t the best patient, and I don’t feel it’s worth putting him through the stress for something that isn’t remotely bothering him. But it’s baffling. And it makes our “It must have been some other black cat” statement – the one we trot out whenever Catorze causes trouble in the neighbourhood – all that more difficult to believe.

    So I’m going to leave it and see what happens. Well, I know exactly what will happen: the fur will grow back, then disappear, then grow back, then disappear, and this will go on forever, like some very annoying perpetual motion device.

    Vampire fangs, reptilian tail, bright white bald patch … could this cat BE any weirder?

  • Rester toute la journée, en sécurité au soleil

    What do you love about where you live?

    Louis Catorze, Cat Daddy and I live in Brentford TW8. We are just down the road from fancy Chiswick, W4, and just a hop across the river from fancy Kew, TW9, and fancy Richmond, KT2, so you’d be forgiven for thinking we were fancy too. We’re not. TW8 is a little rough around the edges and, when stupid shit happens in our town, people say, “That’s SO Brentford”. But we like it for all those reasons.

    And we have a great football team. (No, Americans, AFC Richmond isn’t an actual team.)

    Cat Daddy loves going out locally and bumping into people we know. I do, too, although it rather depends on where we are and what we’re doing. If we’re in the pub, fine. If I have unwashed hair and odd socks and I’m shuffling to the supermarket to pick up some paracetamol for my hangover, not so much.

    After the shock of losing Luther, a supposedly street-smart cat, on the road when we lived in W13, upon moving to TW8 my only concern was for Catorze to be safe. And how lucky we were that Cat Daddy found us the perfect house.

    We have a park at The Front, a playing field at The Back and very little traffic so, when Catorze is gone for the entire day, we don’t worry about what might have happened to him; after a few false alarms, we have learned to trust him to look after himself. We know how lucky we are not to have to worry about cars, coyotes, birds of prey, snakes, poisonous plants, marauding youths or nasty neighbourhood bully cats (well, there is one, and Catorze is it).

    After being passed many times from foster home to foster home, Catorze spent a year with us at our previous place before we moved here. This was the first time in his life that he actually moved with his humans, and I like to think that, on some level, this registered with him.

    We know that the little sod is happy here. I hope that you can tell this, too.

    If that’s where the rainbow ends, I won’t be digging for that pot of gold, thank you.

  • L’herbe est plus verte ailleurs (Partie 2)

    Last year Cat Daddy planted some tarragon in the garden, and it didn’t go well. Look here and here if you want to know the reason why, although I expect you can guess.

    An actual photo of what happened, if you don’t feel like looking at the links.

    Not wishing to go through the same pain this year, Cat Daddy just let low-risk, plain grass grow in what used to be herb troughs. The idea of cultivating special grass for Louis Catorze to sit on, when there is a WHOLE FIELD FULL OF GRASS in the Zone Libre, is ridiculous. But such is the Catorzian way of life; nothing about it ever makes sense.

    As you can see, Catorze has not set paw in either grass trough, not once. The grass remains utterly perfect and untouched, just like the tarragon wasn’t.

    Oh.

    To say that Cat Daddy is raging is a massive understatement. And he was even more furious when he discovered that Catorze had gone gadding about in the longer grass in the Zone Libre (evidence captured below), chugged down however-much of it and then left a massive pile of puke on one of our ruinously-expensive hand-woven Harris Tweed cushions. Unrepeatable Expletives of the Worst Kind poured like summer rain. And not a shite was giv’n by Sa Maj about any of it.

    Cats are bastards. But you already knew that, didn’t you?

    “Circumstantial evidence! Le Roi was framed!”

  • Trier les déchets

    Following BinBagGate last week, I have two questions:

    1. How?

    2. Why?

    The first of these is relatively easy to answer: we suspect that Louis Catorze actually tried to get into the bin bag – I KNOW – and, in thrashing around inside, somehow rolled it across the floor and tipped it over. The thought of this repulses me to my very core because, that very morning, I cuddled the little sod in bed.

    Oui, Mesdames and Messieurs: I ALLOWED A CAT, WHO HAD JUST BEEN INSIDE A BIN BAG, INTO MY BED. I may, in my half-asleep state, even have felt his damp fur and assumed it were rainwater, not realising that it was actually bin juice. (I don’t recall if he felt wet or not. To be honest I daren’t think too hard about it.)

    As for the second question, we are completely lost. Why would a noble monarch, the elder statesman of vampire Chats Noirs, want to climb inside a disgusting bin bag (other than because we wanted and expected him to leave it alone, of course)?

    Cat Daddy and I will probably spend the rest of our lives trying to understand it. Catorze, however, having successfully traumatised me from this ridiculous escapade, is busily planning the next.

    Pretending to cuddle me but secretly rubbing bin juice all over the sheets. Eurgh.

  • Qui a confiance en soi conduit les autres

    What is the most important thing to carry with you all the time?

    Obviously cats aren’t burdened with having to remember their keys, phone and debit card every time they leave the house. They just go, knowing that they can come back and let themselves in whenever they want, in some cases having access via a security door that doesn’t allow interlopers through. Alternatively, in the absence of such a door, some human chump will let them in if they scream loudly enough, whatever time of the day or night.

    I know. They have quite the cushy deal, don’t they?

    So, when Louis Catorze leaves Le Château on ICB, he doesn’t have to remember anything other than his regular feline sass, which he has by the bucketload. Despite the fact that he’s easily the smallest cat on the block, predators and competitors keep their distance. Even when he goes into the Zone Libre, which is Foxy Loxy’s territory, we trust him to look after himself, and we have been more reassured than ever since the day that Cat Daddy saw three foxes take one look at Catorze and run away.

    Catorze has never been bullied by another animal, nor has he been hurt in a fight (apart from that one time when he took a fight wound to the forehead and the vet told us that CATORZE WAS THE AGGRESSOR). We don’t know whether it’s confidence, a total lack of a sense of danger or some sort of creepy Chat Noir magic thing but, whatever he’s doing to keep himself safe, it’s serving him well.

    How wonderful to have such an easy existence that the most taxing part is thinking of new and inventive ways to annoy people. If reincarnation is a thing, I want to come back as my own cat.

    King of le jardin.