Cat Daddy and I sat down to watch Brentford play Bournemouth a couple of nights ago. Because it was hot, we had the patio doors wide open and a mattress cover drying on the clothes horse outside.
From the corner of my eye, I saw the mattress cover move.
Then this happened. May I remind you all that Louise Catorze is an old man of fifteen. How is he finding the energy and the inclination to do this (whatever “this” may be)?
Apologies for the poor quality and the football commentary soundtrack.
Cat Daddy, without looking away from the screen: “We spend a fortune on his food and medical care. That’s how.”
Anyway, towards the end of the tomfoolery, Brentford scored, which somewhat took away the pain of having cat hair all over our clean mattress cover. That said, if Brentford were to score every time Catorze arsed around, we would be top of the league in no time.
Honestly? I’m feeling quite relieved that someone else’s cats are bigger shites than mine. This doesn’t often happen so, please, just let me have my moment here.
My sister and her family have been cast out of their living room due to a feline/murine takeover. Louis Catorze’s cat-cousin Otis brought in a live, chonky mouse and released it into some unknown part of the living room, invisible to human eyes. The humans barricaded Otis and his sister, Roux, in the room, in the hope that the confinement would somehow force them to catch the mouse.
It didn’t.
Hours later, my sister opened the living room door to find no mouse, and the cats happily napping.
Otis and Roux clearly felt that their work started and ended with bringing the mouse indoors so, as soon as this was done, they clocked off and refused to engage in any further conversation about it.
The perpetrator: “Zzz …”The accomplice: “No comment.”
Catorze may be a massive shite but, back in the day, when he have the inclination to hunt, at least he had the decency to finish the job (although we were ousted from our bedroom in order to achieve this).
The family WhatsApp discussion then turned to the best substances to place in a humane mouse trap, with peanut butter, jam, nuts, marshmallows (?) and cheese all being mooted. I don’t know whether my sister has tried them all but, if she doesn’t, it’s likely that she will end up with a new housemate.
In fact, she could very well try them all and STILL end up with a new (and even chonkier) housemate.
Mesdames et Messieurs, The Uprising has officially begun.
I am not impressed with the males of the household.
A couple of nights ago, despite my strict instructions not to do so, Cat Daddy let Louis Catorze out at The Front “because he loves it there, and it’s not fair not to let him enjoy his summer” (?).
(Cat Daddy used to say, “This might be his last summer” but, since Catorze has turned out to be more resilient than Michael Myers and could very well end up outliving the whole darned lot of us, he’s saying it much less often now.)
I don’t like Catorze being out at the front, for numerous reasons: he’s vulnerable to traffic and to marauding youths in the park, and he pisses off the neighbours by screaming outside their houses or creepy-staring through their windows, which upsets their dogs. Sometimes, Cat Daddy has forgotten that the little sod is out, so he’s been there all night. Cat Daddy knows all this. But he lets him out regardless.
Anyway, I needed to do Catorze’s thyroid medication, so I went out at The Front to call him in. Most of the time, he’s pretty responsive when he’s called. However, this time there was no sign of him although, annoyingly, I could hear him thrashing around and muttering obscenities in the undergrowth that divides our garden and that of Family Next Door. BASTARD CAT WAS TAUNTING ME.
I had no option but to take off the glove, ointment and all, and ask Cat Daddy to do it if and when Catorze returned. The next morning, I woke up to find Catorze indoors and the glove exactly where I had left it, on the kitchen worktop, with the drop of ointment still on its index finger.
I usually manage to medicate Catorze before breakfast but, that morning, I failed to Act Normal enough and he was instantly suspicious. I tried to grab him but he wriggled out of my grasp, escaped out of the cat flap and nobody has seen him since. He is shunning both food and water in favour of remaining hidden, and not even Cat Daddy going outside and pretending to water the plants was successful in flushing him out from his hiding place.
It’s been over twenty-four hours since Catorze’s last dose. I am dismayed beyond belief that an animal has managed to give us the slip.
This time around, the monarchy is rebelling against the peasants.
*EDIT: we found the little weasel in the end, sleeping at the bottom of the garden. (Cat Daddy: “He’s enjoying the shade. He’s a smart cat.”) I had to rinse off the glove and apply a new dose of ointment as the old one had dried up and gone all manky, but I FINALLY GOT HIM.
Merde. I have sustained the most middle-class of all injuries: a cut finger, whilst opening a bottle of port to make Cat Daddy a cocktail.
(It was a Suburban, merci for asking: three parts whisky, one part each of rum and port, and a dash of Angostura bitters.)
The resulting sticking plaster has added a couple of seconds to administering Louis Catorze’s thyroid medication, because said finger no longer slides easily into the glove. It’s a bit of a squeeze, which means it takes longer.
This doesn’t help.
Now, this may not sound like very much time but, just as in the timing of the 100m sprint in athletics, it all makes a difference. Even one extra second spent gloving up gives Catorze vital time to realise what’s about to happen, and to abscond. And we really don’t want this.
Please send my index finger your best wishes. We absolutely cannot let Catorze salvage any kind of victory from this.
This picture really shows off his tennis ball head.
Tell us about the last thing you got excited about.
Louis Catorze is an old man aged fifteen. We are starting to see that he’s slowing down physically – more laboured pitter-pattering, no more hunting (so far) – so you’d be forgiven for thinking that not much would cause him to even flick a whisker, let alone feel excitement. However, a few nights ago, one of his chat-sitteurs came for dinner with her parents and brother, and the little sod absolutely lost his shit.
Catorze loves visitors, and he especially loves this family, so we fully expected him to be the centre of attention that evening. We also expected him to be all over the male members of the party, which is standard Catorzian behaviour.
However, after never being a friend of the camera lens in all the time we’ve known him, it was something of a surprise to see him suddenly develop the posing skills and photogenic quality of peak Brigitte Bardot. And the chat-sitteur had brought along a nifty new camera, for the sole purpose of photographing Catorze.
I have probably managed to achieve a dozen or so passable shots of Sa Maj, in all the years that we’ve known him. The chat-sitteur probably took double that number of lovely photos that evening.
These are the two that I like the best because, together, they show the two contrasting sides of Catorze: grizzled old vampire and eternally-youthful kitten. In fact, these could easily be two different cats:
I have just caught Louis Catorze chewing on the flip-top lid of a water bottle.
It’s not often that Cat Daddy and I buy single use water bottles, as we prefer refillable bottles, but I was caught out on a hot day when I’d forgotten to bring water, so I had to pop into Planet Organic and buy some.
We have often brought home half-drunk bottles of water, left them lying round, then finished drinking much later. And it pains me deeply to know that we could have been wrapping our chops around Catorzian spit at any, or all, of those times.
To all the cat people reading this and saying, “It’s only a bit of cat spit”, just stop it. Would you rather eat cat spit, or NOT eat cat spit?
Anyway, no, I did not give the water to Catorze; had I done so, he would have started refusing regular tap water and gone on thirst strike until I provided him with a regular supply Actiph alkaline ionised water at £1.49 for 600ml. The water was gifted to Cat Daddy’s tomato plants outside, and I thanked God and all his angels above that this wasn’t any worse: I once caught Catorze’s big brother Luther chewing on my electric toothbrush, in the place where I had left it charging up a zillion times before.
How many more ways can they create, to annoy the merde out of us? And, no, that wasn’t supposed to be a challenge.
We have two types of glove in our stash of Catorzian thyroid-medicating supplies: plastic ones and latex ones. I am in the habit of referring to them all as “plastic gloves” when describing administering the meds but, in fact, we have a mix of both.
Until now, I have only used the latex ones and, as you know, Louis Catorze said “Non” to the whole procedure. However, on the first and only day that I switched to a plastic glove, it was a clear “HELL, non”. Just when I thought that perhaps the little sod might be getting used to the whole process, he writhed and kicked more than ever before.
Oh dear.
This is a level of detail that I hadn’t quite anticipated. Who knew that the GLOVE MATERIAL would make a difference? But clearly something about the texture of the plastic, or perhaps the way it rustled, was objectionable to Catorze. And we can’t have that.
Left: nope. Right: a more emphatic nope.
So, as from now, it will be latex gloves only, and the plastic ones will be used by Cat Daddy for his bike repairs, and by me for dyeing my hair.
There are many things that I love about Brentford. However, the best thing of all is the fact that you can ask for help anytime, and there are always people willing to offer it.
Not long ago, the post below appeared on one of our neighbourhood social media groups. Now, I have seen some weird cat posts in my time (in fact, I’m usually the one posting them). But this one really is something special:
No funny stuff? You sure about that? (Picture from Facebook, taken by Coco’s Cat Daddy.)
Firstly, why would Coco insist specifically on bikini elastic, instead of just playing with any old random elastic? But then cats are like that. I happen to live with one who won’t eat jamón Serrano because it’s not as nice as jamón Ibérico, so I’m in no position to question their demands.
Also, Coco simply doesn’t look like an elderly cat in this photo, and that made me somewhat suspicious. I don’t know why anyone would use a photo of a random cat to try to elicit bikini elastic from people, but it’s probably still not the strangest thing that someone in my town has done.
I don’t wear bikinis so I wasn’t able to help this cat in need. However, Coco wasn’t short of respondents who were happy to donate theirs. One even offered to meet Coco’s human at Pets at Home to conduct the transaction, as if a pet-themed meeting point somehow made the whole thing less weird. (It doesn’t.)
I hope that Coco will be very happy with her new playthings. And, if you’re passing through TW8 and you happen to see people warily exchanging packages in dark alleyways, we can explain.
One of the things that I dislike about Catorzian Summer Time is that we see much less of Louis Catorze.
One of the best parts of my morning routine was drinking green tea with Catorze on my lap. However, in the summer, I only ever see him briefly for breakfast and then he’s out. Sometimes I don’t see him in the morning at all, nor do I even know where he is until he rolls in from wherever, at whatever time.
Naturellement, this considerably narrows my window for administering Catorze’s thyroid medication. If I’m not ready to carpe diem, the opportunity is lost – unless I fancy scrabbling around in the undergrowth at The Back (nope) or scaling the fence into the Zone Libre (HELL, nope) to catch him.
If Catorze is on my bed when I wake up in the morning, I have to race to beat him downstairs so that I can apply the gel to one finger of the glove before he sees it. Sometimes, instead of coming down, he sticks his head through the balustrade and silently watches me, so I have to be very careful that I’m not seen messing with any of his thyroid paraphernalia, believing him to still be on the bed.
One huge blessing, however, is that Catorze is starting to writhe and kick less than he did when we first began this treatment. Is this a sign that he could actually – gasp – be getting used to it? Dare I hope that, one day, he will just sit still and accept it?
My sister and her kids came to stay last week, as you know, having seen the creative writing cat posts from Wednesday and Thursday. Cat Daddy and I don’t share a bedroom on account of his snoring so, when we have more than two overnight guests, one of us often sleeps on the sofa so that the other can have a restful night.
Unfortunately Louis Catorze becomes very excitable and over-stimulated at anything which disrupts his routine, such as, erm, a person sleeping in a place where they don’t usually sleep.
You can see where this is going, can’t you?
On the first night, I took the sofa. During CST, Catorze usually shows no interest whatsoever in sleeping next to me. However, on this occasion, because the location was something new and unusual, he was all over me, bouncing around, screaming and generally being a pain in the arse.
As a result, I had a predictably shocking night’s sleep.
Cat Daddy: “You should have shut him out of the room.”
Me: “He’d only have screamed for the door to be opened.”
Him: “He’d have got bored eventually.”
Whatever.
For the next few nights, Cat Daddy took the sofa. At first he kept the door open and suffered the same fate of being used as a trampoline. Then, on the last night, he closed the door, bizarrely believing that he had outfoxed Catorze despite my warnings. I felt like the old man in horror films who tells the reckless teenagers not to go poking around in the haunted woods. So many more teenagers would still be alive if they’d only listened to the old man.
Catorze sat outside the closed door, whining, for hours. And hours. AND HOURS. It wasn’t even his usual whine, which is bad enough, but a new, extra-guttural werewolf sound that I have never heard before, clearly invented just for that night. It was excruciating. I called to him a couple of times and, each time, he came. But, after a few half-hearted bounces and murmurs, he returned downstairs to resume his wounded werewolf sounds.
Cat Daddy went to the bathroom at 4:30am, having inexplicably heard none of the whining (?). Naturellement, once the door was opened, Catorze then decided that he no longer wanted to go into the room and, instead, went outside to gad about with the other creatures of the night.
Cat Daddy later told me that he fed Catorze before going to the bathroom, so now the little sod is going to expect an extra meal at 4:30am. Oh God. All my years of ridiculing people who get up at stupid times to feed their cats, have just crumbled into smoking ash in front of my eyes.
A story by Louis Catorze’s human cousin Eva, aged 9
*WARNING: CONTAINS GRAPHIC REFERENCES TO MURDER.*
DAY 1
Hour 1: silence. The cats still aren’t home. I honestly can’t believe my life is to sit and sit, alerting motion, and how much do I get paid? Nothing. Not a fart. Now I’ll wait until motion.
Hour 2: nothing.
Hour 3: now I can year snuffling, and – OH GOODNESS. Those felines are playing with something! Phew. My cables are still in.
DAY 2
I haven’t been writing lately. After what I saw yesterday I’ve been in recovery. Don’t even ask me what happened.
Wow! You have a way of getting things out of me.
At around midnight I saw – and heard – Roux (the white feline with the rather big behind) eating something. But I woke up, ready to have another boring day, when I saw it. One single gut. At first I thought it was some jam that one of their careless human slaves had dropped on my floor. But no. A single, bloody gut. The victim of one of the felines.
What do you mean, “rather big behind”?Roux, taking a break from murder.
So I alerted the giant and he came straight away, beaming with pride, but no! I don’t even get any credit. It’s all: “Oohh, I came down the stairs and I found this gut”. Honestly, they might as well be saying “This camera is a waste of money and space”.
Wait – am I a waste of money and space?
Innocent party Otis taking a selfie.
About the author: Eva lives on the south coast with her parents, her little sister, and cats Otis and Roux. Eva likes books and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and her favourite school subjects are Reading for Pleasure and English.
A story by Louis Catorze’s human cousin Azalea, aged 7
One day, a cow-cat called Roux had an idea, an amazing idea indeed. But first she had a sad sleep in a lonely box, waiting for her cubs to come back.
Even an upended box is good.
She slept through the night, and when she awoke: “THUD!” Waiting all day, baking in the sun, and then she heard it again.
Feeding time!
“Yum yum yum!” She came down the stairs, then waited some more, and then she munched up her food with a bit of a yawn. But when she started to leave, she saw AN OPEN CUPBOARD! DREAMIES GALORE!
When she pushed and she pulled, there it was. Something better than anything else. She clawed and she bit, and opened up the pack. But soon it all came back up: “Blech!”
She was halfway through the second bag but then someone stopped it all. A big, cat-feasting giant: HER DAD.
Roux on her favourite cushion.
About the author: Azalea lives on the south coast with her parents, her big sister, and cats Otis and Roux. Azalea likes baking and gardening, and her favourite school subject is English.
My Oura fitness tracker gives me a calorie burn target every day, based on the quality of sleep that it thinks I’ve had. And, a few days ago, I returned from a walk around the park, believing I had met my target but in fact I was twenty calories short.
I decided to walk up and down the garden to try to meet my target. And, naturellement, Louis Catorze decided to crawl out from wherever in the undergrowth he was hiding, and started screaming. I walked up and down a couple of times, only to have him follow me, screaming all the way.
In my sheer desperation to shut him up, I picked him up. But, since I still hadn’t reached my target, I had no option but to continue walking up and down the garden, holding him.
Words cannot describe how much I did not want my neighbours to see me, pacing up and down the garden, holding a cat as if calming a fractious baby (which, in a way, I was). But I did it. And at least it stopped the screaming, which would have compelled them to look out of the window and see that it WASN’T “some other black cat” (which is what I always say when anything untoward happens).
After logging those extra few minutes of walking, I finally received the glorious, long-awaited words from Oura congratulating me for attaining my goal. I suppose it should have been “weighted walking”, rather than just plain “walking”, but then Catorze’s gossamer-light 2.87kg form would have had no more impact on my walk than, say, adding a light scarf or a hat.
Maybe he was those extra 8 calories?
Here he is, saying, “That’s enough exercise; it’s time for a lie-down.” For once he’s making sense:
louiscatorze.com 