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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 mon nom

    What is your middle name? Does it carry any special meaning/significance?

    Louis Catorze doesn’t have a middle name. To be honest, his full title – Sa Majesté Louis Catorze, Le Roi Soleil – is already long enough. If we were to do as our parents did and call our kid by his full name to tell him off, by the time we got to the end, we would have forgotten why he was in trouble (and given him enough time to make a swift getaway).

    Outwardly, Catorze is more Prince of Darkness than Sun King. However, the human Sun King’s middle name was Dieudonné, meaning “gift of God”, which is very appropriate as that’s exactly what Catorze thinks he is. If he were to choose his own middle name, I’m pretty sure he would choose that.

    Most people assume that we named him Louis, but he was already called that when he came to us. The lady who found him had thought he was a girl and named him Louise (her own middle name), and the rescue subsequently changed it to Louis. We added the “Catorze” just to be funny, and this has since led to a number of derivatives such as Le Roi, Seigneur (technically a demotion from a royal title but he doesn’t appear to have noticed) and Sa Maj. For a while I even referred to him as LXIV when writing about him online, just because it was short. However, I am not good with numbers, and discovering that LXIV was Roman for sixty-four just made things confusing.

    Cat Daddy also has multiple different names for Catorze. None of them are repeatable here (nor anywhere, come to think of it), but here is a hint of the very worst one (yes, THAT one).

    He hears us. He’ll come when he’s good and ready.

  • Les chatteries en pensent quoi?

    A few nights ago, I was listening to Sky Sports news. (Well, I say “listening” but I was zoning in and out whilst sending cat photos to my friend on WhatsApp.) One thing, however, did make me sit up and take notice, and that was when the reporter said, whilst discussing French football, “And what do the catteries think of this?”

    Excusez-moi? What do catteries have to do with football … unless we’re back to the topic of Kurt Zouma again? And I imagine the catteries would be as disgusted as the cat households, non?

    The British public haven’t seen a great deal of Kurt Zouma lately because he’s been out of action with an injury, but I am delighted to report that, one year on from That Incident, his team, West Ham, are on a disastrous downwards slide. At the time of writing this, they are only a couple of points away from the dreaded bottom three of the table:

    Oh dear.

    Obviously I can’t prove that West Ham’s misfortunes are because one of their number was mean to a cat. But I can’t prove that they’re not, either. And, had Kurt Zouma’s cat been a Chat Noir, there would have been no doubt in my mind whatsoever.

    Here is Louis Catorze, so unimpressed with the West Ham performance against Brighton that he can’t even bear to look:

    “C’est scandaleux.”

    He feels sorry for them. But in an “I pity you” kind of way, not in an empathetic way.

    EDIT: after replaying Sky Sports news, it turned out that they were saying “Qataris” but, unusually, they had rhymed it with “batteries” and not with “safaris”. I think I like this pronunciation better.

  • La fatigue des moustaches

    Remember when Louis Catorze was a messy eater? Yeah, well, he still is, only in a different way. He no longer makes a mess with crunched-up pieces of dry food, indicating that his teeth are doing ok, but, when he eats his wet food, he spreads it all over his bowl. And, once he’s done that, he won’t eat those bits unless they’re all pushed back to the centre of his bowl.

    This never used to be a thing for Catorze. However, when one of my friends* visited and insisted on pushing all the spread-out bits of food together several times a day, she condemned us to an eternity of it. Thanks to her, Catorze now demands this all the time, and nothing triggers Cat Daddy’s Unrepeatable Expletives faster than me saying, “Could you push his food together for him?”

    *Yes, she was well aware of what she was starting. No, she didn’t – and still doesn’t – care. Are you happy now, Lizzi?

    Now, before you start yelling “Whisker stress” at me, hang on a second. Whisker stress is, apparently, a genuine thing; cats feel uncomfortable when pressing their heads into small places such as narrow cat flaps or high-sided bowls, because their whiskers get squished. (And, hilariously, it’s called “la fatigue des moustaches” in French.)

    All right, no need to stress yer whiskers.

    However, Catorze has a special Necoichi tilted stress-free cat bowl which was designed to avoid the need for this. It has no high sides and no hard edges. Yet, even when he uses this, Catorze spreads food all over it and then creepy-stares at us until we push it back to the middle.

    As a result we are now putting more effort into the presentation of Sa Maj’s food than we ever have into our own. Either the world has gone mad, or we have.

    An actual photo of me serving up Catorze’s food. (Picture from lakeland.co.uk.)

  • Croyez-vous au destin?

    The new WordPress Jetpack app gives a new prompt every day, to inspire anyone who might be in the midst of a creative dearth. Obviously I don’t need it because Louis Catorze’s misadventures always give me plenty of content, but the prompts are, nevertheless, food for thought; not only do I think about how I would respond, but I also consider how I might give each one a Catorzian feel.

    Occasionally I even wonder how the little sod would answer them, although they would largely involve merde and the non-giving of it.

    Last week, one of the prompts was as follows:

    Do you believe in fate/destiny?

    In general, maybe. But, when it comes to cats and how they come to be in our lives, most likely.

    Obviously timing plays its part regarding which ones come our way, because much depends upon when the last cat leaves us, when we feel ready to start looking for the next, and which ones happen to be available when we do look. But, when the new one starts doing things that the previous one did, you start to wonder whether each might somehow be responsible for sending us the next.

    I like to think that Luther enjoyed his time with us so much that he saw this sickly fellow Chat Noir and decided, “This cat deserves some good people”. However, it’s far more likely that he knew what a shite Catorze was, and thought, “Right … this will be funny!”

    Here they are, pictured several months apart, sitting in our old house on the same step, in the same pose:

    Luther: “Just hold still and let them take a photo. That’s it. Now watch their faces!”

  • La crise d’argenterie

    Oh. Mon. Dieu. We have a Code Argent situation here at Le Château: Cat Daddy got drunk the other night and put Louis Catorze’s Louis XIV antique silverware in the dishwasher, and now there is a mark on the fork. I had a feeling that one of us would do this sooner or later. And I had a feeling it would be him and not me.

    Merde.

    Cat Daddy: “Well, how was I supposed to know? It looks just the same as any other cutlery.” (It really doesn’t. We have a grand total of zero pieces of cutlery that look like this one.)

    Now, should I continue to use the fork and hope that Catorze’s creepy kitty sixth sense doesn’t detect the imperfect silverware and cause him to reject any food tainted by it? Or should I … fix it? Is this a thing? How does one fix these things without use of a toxic liquid metal that would poison la personne royale?

    Whilst we figure out what to do, Catorze is weighing up alternative food options:

    A nice bit of écureuil cru for dinner, maybe?

  • Vivre la vie sans excuses, voyager sans regret

    Some people believe that the vernal equinox denotes the true start of spring. Others think spring starts on 1st March, the first day of meteorological spring. We at Le Château, however, know that it’s when Louis Catorze starts requesting to go out at The Front, and he does this by creepy-staring, pawing at the shutters and generally being a nuisance.

    He isn’t allowed out at The Front, unless we are sitting in the living room and can easily intervene if he ends up accosting some poor passer-by. However, this doesn’t stop him from going out there, and we have no idea how he does it.

    In the past, some of Catorze’s followers have suggested that we buy a tracker for him. For those who aren’t familiar with this item, it’s essentially an electronic tag for valuable and/or attractive cats who are likely to be stolen, or for miscreants who can’t be trusted. I imagine you can guess to which group Sa Maj belongs.

    Regretfully, I think a tracker will make our life harder, not easier, as I shall endeavour to explain.

    Although trackers can tell you if your cat is in an undesirable location, once they’re on their way you can’t stop them from going, unless you follow them and haul their sorry arse back. Do we really want to be trawling through gutters, park bins and neighbours’ gardens trying to recapture an errant Catorze? Plus we know from bitter experience that trying to retrieve him when he doesn’t want to be retrieved is a pointless exercise, and that we’re far better off just waiting for him to return of his own accord.

    As well as telling you where your cat is, another function of the tracker is to be able to “share your cat’s location with your family and friends”. Now, I am the sort of weirdo who is interested in the whereabouts of other people’s cats, but most normal people only really care about their own. So I can’t imagine that any of our friends or family would be particularly bothered. And what gets the little sod off the hook every time he causes trouble in our local area is the lack of solid evidence; the last thing we want is neighbours being able to pinpoint his exact location, invalidating our “It must have been some other black cat” defence.

    In short, it doesn’t look as if a tracker would work for us. Furthermore, Catorze doesn’t, erm, meet the minimum weight requirement (3.5kg) to qualify for the models I’ve looked at.

    Do you know what your furry overlords get up to when you let them out? And would you WANT to know?

    If the tracker looked like this, I bet he’d wear it. (Photo from behance.net.)

  • De bon vouloir servir Le Roi

    Cat Daddy and I have just been for a pared-down weekend away. I say “pared-down” because it was supposed to be in a fancy hotel in Manchester, but I’m too ill to fully appreciate fancy and, worse still, Cat Daddy is now starting to cough, so we went for a shorter stay in a Premier Inn instead. We could probably have done with staying at home and resting, but a family member had bought us tickets for a Wrexham AFC* football match, and we didn’t think we’d have another opportunity to go.

    *Because of the stardust of Ryan Reynolds and that other guy (watch “Welcome to Wrexham” if you have Disney Plus), the world and his cat wants Wrexham tickets. Even people who aren’t Wrexham fans want tickets. In fact, even people who aren’t FOOTBALL fans want tickets.

    As luck would have it, one of Louis Catorze’s favourite people was planning to be in London for the weekend, so she was happy to come and look after the little sod. (He always behaves impeccably for her, which is both a relief and really annoying.)

    During our chat-sitteur’s previous stay, Catorze was on dry food only. So we had to advise her of the change.

    Us: “By the way, he now has wet food mixed with the dry food.”

    Her: “Ok.”

    Us: “And you have to cut it up into really small pieces …”

    Her: “Ok.”

    Us: “… Using his antique Louis XIV silverware.”

    Her: “…”

    Catorze had an absolute ball, following his chat-sitteur around, cuddling up to her in bed and pretending to be an adorable little kitten. Apart from a few bursts of parkour at reasonable hours (“You weren’t exaggerating about his thundering around the house!”) he was utterly saintly. As soon as we returned he morphed back into his usual self, giving us the full Day-Lewis playing the part of a cat who hadn’t been fed for the entire weekend, creepy-staring, screaming and generally being a shite. The adorable little kittenness was gone in a flash.

    Here are some pictures of the fun he had without us. I know that we all want our cats to feel comfortable with their chat-sitteurs, but come on.

    Curled up on the chat-sitteur’s lap, about 0.6 seconds after we drove off.
    Cavorting around on the chat-sitteur’s bed.
    This is what I had to deal with when we returned.
    Normal service has now resumed.

  • Partager les tâches ménagères

    We all know how much Louis Catorze enjoys Rodent Duty, but it seems that he has bountifully decided to share the joy with his comrades. Blue the Smoke Bengal – who hasn’t really visited us much since that time Catorze hissed at him in front of the whole street – has decided to join the party.

    Catorze was enjoying Boys’ Club one night when he suddenly jumped off his papa’s lap and shot through the Sureflap. However, he didn’t rush fully out and, instead, remained in the wall tunnel in the wall for a few seconds, with his silly tail sticking out from under the Sureflap door, surveying the situation before deciding what to do. We then realised that Blue was in the garden, hovering curiously around the Rodent Duty site.

    Catorze flew out of the Sureflap and, for an awful moment, we thought we would have to peel him off poor Blue and shamefacedly confess to his mamma that our little sod had attacked him. But, instead of launching himself upon Blue, he stopped just short of him and the pair of them stared at each other. They remained staring for a minute or two before Catorze obviously said something unpleasant, and poor Blue took off through the gap in the fence to the Zone Libre. (Yes, despite his, erm, superior poundage, Blue still fits through the gap.)

    Could the Sun King’s icy heart be thawing in his old age? Or is he just seizing the opportunity to delegate one of his jobs to someone else and pass off their handiwork as his own?

    “And, when you find it, bring it to moi so that I can claim la gloire.”

  • L’apothéose de Louis Catorze

    Louis Catorze is pitter-pattering around Le Château looking unspeakably ridiculous, with two baldish arms and a bald spot on his body.

    His tattoo sleeves still look like this:

    I took this from above whilst TUC, and he looked up to see what the heck I was up to.

    And, Mesdames et Messieurs, the solar eclipse has evolved into this:

    Not great.

    We have utterly exhausted every option in terms of figuring out a cause; he’s not been bitten, he’s not catching himself on something as he crawls through the hole in the fence leading to the Zone Libre, and it’s not an area where stray Broadline has eroded away the fur (I am a poor shot when it comes to applying spot-on treatment, but I’m not THAT bad). And nobody knows what to do about it. Not even the vet knows what to do.

    The little sod’s birthday is in a couple of months. Let’s hope he is looking a bit more normal by then, otherwise I will be relying very heavily on the black pen of the iPhone’s Markup tool to make him look presentable. It simply won’t do to have holey fur in one’s Official Birthday Portrait.

  • Je crache sur ta tombe

    I am back at school this week, having spent the whole of half term being ill. And when I say “the whole of half term” I really do mean every bit of it; I started feeling off colour on the evening I came home from school, and I’m still trying to shake the dregs of it right now. Sadly it didn’t tail off after I blogged about it; in fact, it got a whole lot worse first, and I had to cancel most of my half term plans.

    During this time Louis Catorze was about as much use as a punch in the eye, and twice as painful. One night he ramped up his parkour by several notches, bouncing all over me and knocking things off my bedside table. Every time I coughed, it was like a dose of amphetamines to him and seemed to buoy him for the next round of madness.

    The next night he left me alone until 4:45am, when I decided to go and sleep downstairs because I was worried about my coughing keeping Cat Daddy and our overnight guest awake. That was when Catorze started creepy-staring for food. FOR FOOD. AT 4:45AM.

    When I give into the creepy staring, Cat Daddy often makes sarcastic and Unrepeatable Expletive-ridden remarks about me “pandering to him”. But, contrary to what he believes, that’s not what it’s about. I give in because the bone-chilling staring makes me so uncomfortable that I can’t bear it. I think I could have been forgiven for surrendering on this occasion but, luckily, despite being ill, I remained switched-on enough to know that, if I complied this one time, I would be condemning myself to a 4:45am wake-up call for the rest of my life. So I ignored him, lay on the sofa and closed my eyes, at which point the little sod jumped onto my chest and had a good old shake.

    Now, when most cats shake, it’s not unheard of for a few stray drops of spit to fly out of their mouths. However, because Catorze can’t fully close his mouth on account of his fangs, his shakes let loose a lot more than a few drops. So, as well as my own copious snot from being ill, my face was then showered with cat spit. Some went into my eye, and I’m pretty sure I ate some, too.

    I know that some people out there willingly ingest cat spit, by allowing their cat to lick their faces and their mouths. I am not one of those people. And, if you were to ask anyone whether they would rather swallow cat spit or not swallow cat spit, I know what most of them would say.

    At various random intervals throughout that day, Catorze came back to creepy-stare at me some more. Look at his evil face. I’m almost starting to wonder if eating more cat spit would be preferable to this:

    No.

  • L’argenterie royale

    Louis Catorze is continuing to enjoy his mix of wet and dry food. However, he still expects the wet food, which is already in small pieces, to be cut up into EVEN SMALLER pieces for him. If we don’t do it he just leaves the food to go dry and gross, and this makes it much harder to clean the bowl.

    (And, no, I have no idea how it is that he manages to rip the heads off rodents, yet he can’t bite into a small, soft piece of cooked fish unless humans cut it up for him.)

    With this in mind, one of my friends sent Catorze some antique Louis XIV silverware (yes, SILVERWARE, not “cutlery” – merci, Google, for correcting me). What an unbelievably lucky Roi he is.

    Oh. Mon. Dieu. Merci, Cathie!

    Cat Daddy’s initial reaction: “What the f***? What is wrong with your friends?”

    Cat Daddy’s follow-up reaction, upon discovering that Louis XIV silverware is a real thing and not something that I made up: “Ooh. That must be worth a bit!”

    Naturellement, being special silverware, we can’t just sling it into the dishwasher alongside our own plebby stainless steel. Care instructions are as follows:

    Separate the Metals

    Never wash silver-plated flatware with stainless-steel flatware in the same dishwasher load. The silver and stainless steel chemically react in the presence of automatic dish-washing detergent, causing silver ions to disassociate from the silver plate and transfer to the stainless steel. This leaves pits on the silver plate and may cause spotting of the stainless steel, especially if the metals are touching each other.

    Safe Way To Clean

    Hand washing with a mild dish-washing liquid is the safest way to clean silver-plated flatware. Wash the flatware in hot sudsy water right after the meal is done. Rinse them with cool tap water and immediately dry with a clean, soft cloth.

    Oh dear. Cat Daddy was already unhappy about how much hard work it is to wet-feed the little sod, with the cutting of the food and the frequent bowl changes, so he was not pleased at all to learn that we now need to hand-wash Catorze’s antique silverware. The Unrepeatable Expletives rang out through the air on that fine morn like the chimes of Big Ben on New Year’s Eve (except going on for considerably longer).

    Sitting in proud admiration of himself, knowing that he deserves decent serving implements.

    Here I am (below), having just used antique Louis XIV silverware to mash up already-soft Cool Cat Club cod and salmon pâté on Catorze’s Necoichi tilted stress-free (I’m not joking; it really is called that) cat bowl, adding a garnish of Orijen. Meanwhile, I am eating cheese on toast from a chipped Wilko* plate.

    How did it come to this?

    *Fancy followers: ask your more downmarket friends.

    Marcus Wareing would be so impressed with this presentation.

  • Des reflets d’égoïsme

    There aren’t many things that can drag Louis Catorze’s lazy arse from his igloo, once he’s decided to stay put. However, Reflets de France tuna rillettes is/are (I’m still not sure which is correct; native Frenchies, is it a singular or a plural noun?) one of those precious few things.

    After ignoring me for much of Monday, as if by magic he decided to be my friend when I sat down to eat some tuna rillettes on oatcakes. After much creepy staring, aggressive headbutting and general bullying and intimidation, I acquiesced and offered him a few morsels. He gleefully hoovered them down, unable to believe his luck, then settled on my lap, purring so hard that his ears shuddered.

    Maybe ear-shuddering during hard purring is a known thing, but it’s not something I have observed before. It’s subtle but nonetheless present, and you can see it in the right ear:

    Check out the shudder on those bald, piggy ears.

    Sadly an unwanted side effect of this whole escapade is that, in his haste to eat his precious tuna rillettes, Catorze inadvertently shoved one piece with his snout through the gap between the floorboards. Even freshly-opened tuna rillettes smell(s?) like rotting corpses from hell, so I daren’t even think about what it/they might smell like in a week, a year or even longer.

    I now have visions of the next occupant of this house, whoever they may be, taking up the floorboards expecting to find evidence of a gruesome murder. If only they knew that it is, in fact, evidence of the life of a greedy, selfish cat and a pathetic human who gave in.

    He has the audacity to look at me as if I caused the smell under the floorboards.

  • Les étranges compagnons de lit

    I always go to bed much earlier than Cat Daddy, even during the school holidays. After I have settled down and closed my eyes, we go through this same ritual repeatedly:

    1. Louis Catorze lies with/on me for a little while, then leaves.

    An actual photo of bedtime with Catorze.

    2. When he arrives back downstairs, he discovers that Cat Daddy has shut him out of the living room so he whines to be let in.

    3. Cat Daddy either doesn’t hear him or chooses to ignore him.

    4. Catorze whines again. And again. AND AGAIN. [At this point may I mention that, however bad Catorzian screaming may be, it doesn’t have the gut-wrenching, fingernails-down-the-blackboard pathos of Catorzian whining. And, no, I have no idea why Cat Daddy cannot hear it from the other side of the door, yet I can hear it all the way upstairs.]

    5. I shout, “Please would you let him in?”

    6. No response. Whining continues.

    7. I repeat my message to Cat Daddy via WhatsApp.

    8. No response. Whining continues.

    9. I finally phone Cat Daddy and beg him to let the little sod in.

    10. I hear living room door open, then, “Well, are you coming in or not, you little f***er?”

    11. Door closes again.

    12. Pitter-pattering up the stairs, then Catorze, having decided that he no longer wishes to go into the living room, appears back in the bedroom.

    13. Cycle restarts from Point 1.

    Good grief.

    Am I going to have to start sneaking stealthily off to bed, in the same way that people with normal cats have to slide the tin opener silently from the drawer?

    Cats are weird. And ours is the weirdest of the lot, most likely because he isn’t even a cat.

    Boys’ Club in bed is rather more fun.

  • Un salon chaud et confortable

    It’s half term … and, in typical teacher fashion, I am sick. I’ve been all night with throat pain and, as his new favourite thing appears to be to sleep on top of me, either on my chest or across my stomach like a living belt, Louis Catorze isn’t helping.

    Yesterday, after clearing his bowl, Catorze approached me and sat at my feet, creepy-staring at me. I thought he wanted more food. But, instead of assuming his usual position under the breakfast bar when I headed for his food cupboard, he pitter-pattered towards the front room.

    He wasn’t hungry. He wanted us to change rooms. And we know this because he’s done it before.

    I dutifully followed Catorze to the front room, ignoring the string of Unrepeatable Expletives muttered by Cat Daddy under his breath. When I reached the front room, Saint Jésus: IT WAS WARM! Gloriously so, in fact. The little sod wasn’t just being weird; he’d had enough of being cold and wanted us to join him in the warm room.

    Obviously he has done this multiple times when temperature hasn’t been an issue. But I shall just pretend that he was being clever on this occasion, and that he loves me so much that he wanted me to be warm with him.

    Here he is, rescuing me from the demon cold. The fact that he then benefits from a warm lap in his favourite room is purely coincidental.

    “Follow moi to the warmth, Maman!”