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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.

  • Louis le Comte

    You know how annoying it is when you’re messaging someone and Autocorrect changes it to “ducking”? Come on. Anyone who claims not to know this is a liar (or doesn’t have a phone).

    Cat Daddy has discovered a new dimension to this problem.

    Louis Catorze recently decided to curl up on a mattress cover which had just been washed and which was drying outside. Cat Daddy photographed him and sent me the picture, declaring that Catorze was a “total count”.

    Just make yourself comfortable.

    So … which count is he?

    Here are some options, as suggested by friends:

    1. Count von Count from Sesame Street. He’s goth, toothy and cute, but is he a bit TOO cute to be a role model for Catorze?

    Picture, very appropriately, from muppet.fandom.com.

    2. Vicomte Sébastien de Valmont from Dangerous Liaisons (if, indeed, a viscount can still count as a count?). Like Catorze, he’s French. However, he seduces women for fun. And ladies aren’t really Catorze’s thing, if you get what I mean.

    Picture from vulture.com.

    3. Edmond Dantès, aka The Count of Monte Cristo. He’s French, vengeful and a skilled escape artist, and he suddenly finds himself with untold riches, all of which make him startlingly similar to Catorze. This could be the one.

    Picture from thetimes.co.uk.

    4. Count Dracula, the papa of them all. An evil, shapeshifting bloodsucker who sleeps all day and goes on psychotic rampages at night. Bingo. I think we have our answer.

    Picture from lwiles.com.

    Maybe he should never have been Sa Majesté Louis Catorze, Le Roi Soleil. Maybe he should always have been Count Dracula. But, as we Brits are aware, once the monarchy are in place, deposing them isn’t as easy as all that.

    Which member of the aristocracy most resembles your cat? And are there any counts that we have neglected to, erm, count? Please let us know.

  • Les poils de la bête

    Merci à Dieu: the Easter holidays are here. And it looks as if I will be spending them brushing, because Louis Catorze is shedding fur. A lot of fur. His tiny body is producing more fur than I can handle, a bit like that old fable about the machine that churns out salt forever because the person forgets the magic word to make it stop.

    Yesterday I managed to extract a huge handful of fur from one side of him.

    Cat Daddy: “Why only one side?”

    Me: “I couldn’t brush the other side.”

    Him: “Why not?”

    Me: “He was lying on it.”

    Him: “So just flip him!”

    Me: “I couldn’t. He refused to be flipped.”

    Him: “He’s 3kg!”

    Me: “HE REFUSED TO BE FLIPPED.”

    Cat Daddy has probably only had to force Catorze to do things against his will about four times, versus my countless times. So, really, he should be taking my word for it regarding Catorze’s flippability, or lack thereof.

    Anyway, I’m brushing him 862 times a day (that’s sessions, not individual brush strokes) and it’s not enough. No number in the world would be enough; every time I do it, it’s as if I have never done it before. And I am pretty sure that, if I kept brushing indefinitely and didn’t stop, the fur would just keep coming until, eventually, I would be left with a bald, screaming skeleton.

    Here he is, sitting in the tarragon (again), looking wonderfully soft. And so he should, after all my efforts:

    “Brush moi.”
    “Then brush moi again. And again.”

    UPDATE: since the above photos were taken, Cat Daddy has devised a plan and put it into action. Will these lethal shanks solve the problem, or just move it elsewhere?

    Sit on THIS, Sa Maj!

  • L’envahisseur de l’espace

    These were the scenes at the château of Louis Catorze’s cat-cousin King Ghidorah recently. Might I add that my sister and her family have one (1) cat:

    Left to right: King Ghidorah, Nephew 2, Random Chat Noir.

    The impinging feline was busted on the Ring security device positioned by King Ghidorah’s food bowls. My sister chatted away through the talky bit, assuming it to be King Ghidorah, and it was only when Nephew 2 wandered into the kitchen that they discovered the truth. “It’s not King Ghidorah, Mum! IT’S NOT KING GHIDORAH! It’s a small, really nice black cat!”

    Incidentally Château Ghidorah is a non-Sureflap household, so their kitchen turns into an all-you-can-eat buffet whether they want this or not.

    The absence of any visible cerises noires, and the fact that King Ghidorah, who is usually a massive Alpha Male scrapper, was happy about all this, suggested that the visitor was a young female cat. After nuzzling Nephew 2, purring and trilling, she approached King Ghidorah for a sniff and a kiss:

    King Ghidorah and his nouvelle amie.

    My sister posted on local forums, and a representative from a local rescue came over a couple of days after these photos were taken to scan for a chip. There wasn’t one, so L’Impingeuse was promptly collared and labelled with the rescue lady’s phone number. However, this plan to send a message to her humans was royally scuppered because, the day after the collar and label were affixed, the little sod returned without them.

    The rescue lady then dropped off a SECOND collar and label but, in order for them to work, L’Impingeuse actually needed to leave. She wouldn’t. In fact, she just stayed and made herself at home for the rest of the week.

    Complete with label and collar, on Nephew 2’s bed.

    After a few more days, the rescue lady finally received a message from the owner. Apparently they had been away dealing with an emergency, and the cat had escaped from the neighbour’s place where she was supposed to be under house arrest.

    So I don’t think we will be seeing her anymore.

    My nephews were a little sad as they had become used to a second cat being around, with the bell on her collar jingle-jangling as she went. However, Nephew 2 is relieved that his portion of the inheritance will not become the Second Cat Fund (since he was the first to condone the impinging by stroking her).

    Anyway, Mesdames et Messieurs: we must chip our cats. We already knew this, obviously, but it doesn’t do any harm to repeat it. Had the owner done this, my sister would have been able to establish ownership quickly. (And the rescue lady said that the absence of a chip meant L’Impingeuse most likely wasn’t spayed, either, so she could return home and pop out hundreds of babies.)

    We have also learned that, given half a chance, all cats will take the piss. We already knew this, too, didn’t we?

  • Le pain à l’estragon

    Cat Daddy is coping well with life under house arrest. Over the weekend he conducted numerous experiments to see whether wine eased the symptoms of Covid, but unfortunately he can’t remember any of the results so he says he’s going to have to repeat them.

    In other news, Cat Daddy’s tarragon is starting to sprout again (not a euphemism; I do mean actual tarragon). And so, naturellement, Louis Catorze has felt compelled to sit his arse on top of it, having shown zero interest in the trough when it was just soil.

    Luckily the tarragon has been dislodged/bent to one side by the royal rump, so none of the herb has actually come into contact with anywhere unmentionable. But this is still far from being an optimal situation.

    Hark! Do you hear the sound of Unrepeatable Expletives ringing out through the springtime air?

    Cat Daddy is absolutely livid, but there’s nothing he can do about it. He’s already busy enough devising inventive ways of getting one over on the squirrels and the pigeons, and he simply doesn’t have time to police another individual too (ironically, the very one whose responsibility it is to fend off the squirrels and the pigeons).

    Will Cat Daddy succeed in deterring the royal rump? Stay tuned …

  • Le Château Arc-En-Ciel

    As you know, Louis Catorze loves having visitors to Le Château and is usually an excellent host (apart from that one time when we didn’t know where he was, then I found him in the shrubbery and had to poke him out with a broom).

    Male visitors are especially well-received. However, if said male happens to be gay, Catorzian excitement levels go stratospheric. And that is what happened when a friend came over last week (before Cat Daddy tested positive, I might add).

    As we weren’t going to be home when our friend arrived, we gave him a key and he let himself in. The sequence of events was as follows:

    1. Catorze: “Ooh, a stranger dans mon Château! I must investigate!”

    2. Catorze: “A man! Ooh la la!”

    3. Catorze: “A BONHOMME WHO PREFERS THE COMPANY OF BONHOMMES! ONE OF MY PEOPLE!”

    4. Friend sits down. Catorze is all over him.

    5. Friend stops stroking him for 0.4 seconds. Catorze is highly affronted by this and bullies him for more cuddles.

    6. Friend leans over onto one side in foetal position on sofa to make himself comfortable.

    7. Friend dozes off and wakes up like this:

    Cheeky sod.

    8. Catorze bullies him into lying flat on the sofa so that he can curl up properly on his lap.

    “Now stay put until I say, salope.”

    9. Cat Daddy arrives home to find them asleep together.

    10. Cat Daddy sits down and chats to friend. Catorze takes a whole ten minutes to exit friend’s lap and go and greet his papa.

    11. Cat Daddy and friend open wine at 4:30pm (!) and go outside. Catorze follows and continues to pester friend.

    12. I come home to two drunk men and a screaming cat.

    13. I tell friend that Catorze fights with most other cats but loves hanging out with unneutered males. Friend spits out wine through laughing so much.

    The moral of this story is twofold and takes the form of “Good news, bad news” which is, by now, familiar in Catorzian lore:

    – Our cat is a delightfully affectionate little soul, and it makes me so proud when visitors say they’d like to take him home.

    – Our cat would be beyond useless during a home invasion and would most likely snuggle the burglars, make them a cup of tea and tell them to take their time.

  • Le point positif

    Merde, merde and thrice merde: Cat Daddy tested positive for Covid yesterday afternoon.

    To be fair, he’s done very well indeed to get this far without testing positive. But what a monumentally massive pain in the arse. We have had to cancel Disco the dog’s human sister coming for dinner (Friday), Cat Daddy’s rugby hospitality day out with the blokes from his Friday evening Zoom call (today) AND my mum coming over for Mothers’ Day weekend (all weekend).

    So now Cat Daddy is stuck indoors for [nobody in the U.K. has a clue how many as The Rules are so confusing] days.

    I am negative (my test result, I mean; this isn’t a general observation on my demeanour, although that still works) so we’re watching television and eating in separate rooms, and we may, at some point, meet outdoors, two metres apart, for the odd chat. This is the sensible and practical thing to do. However, in the event of being TUC, I can bring things to Cat Daddy but he can’t bring things to me. This is more annoying than I ever thought possible.

    Louis Catorze won’t be able to sit with us both this weekend, so the little sod will have to make a choice. I don’t suppose this will turn out well for me.

    Me: “Would you like to sit with your papa or …” Catorze: “Mon papa.”

  • 20.000 lieues sous le chat

    Every cat person, it seems, has a name for the state of being during which you ask others to bring things to you because you cannot possibly move the cat from your lap.

    My cousin, for instance, calls it PCP (Pussy Cat Privileges). Cat Daddy and I call it TUC (Trapped Under Cat). However we may name it, it’s the ultimate in feline worship and we cat freaks regard it as bad form both to dislodge the cat and to complain about having to bring things to the person who is TUC.

    Cat Daddy is TUC.

    When it happens to me, if Cat Daddy is in another room, I text him requesting drink/food/whatever and sign my message “TUC”. My TUC requests tend to be quite straightforward and reasonable: a cup of tea, a refill of my water bottle, that kind of thing. Cat Daddy, however, is more, erm, elaborate, and he has been known to say, “Could you make me a cocktail, please? Two parts rye bourbon to one part Cointreau, with some crushed ice, served in a cocktail coupe?” (I’m not joking. He asked for this just the other day.)

    What name do you give to TUC? And what has been your most outlandish request when TUC, or your most extreme action to avoid disturbing a sleeping cat?

    Not sure I’d go quite this far. (Picture from Reddit.com.)

  • Le royaume déchu

    Louis Catorze escaping out at The Front is bad enough. We know this because he has done it countless times, sidestepping all our security measures as if they were just air and rolling on the pavement where dogs have done unimaginable things (ugh). But the idea of him doing it from the uppermost window in Le Château, with a literal slippery slope to a sheer drop on the other side, is just beyond the pale. And this is exactly what the little sod wanted to do yesterday afternoon.

    I saw his head flick in the direction of the open window when he heard dogs barking in the park. I saw his psycho eyes widen and his fangs protrude (both of which always happen when mischief is afoot). And I saw him do the pre-launch shimmy, with the wiggle of the arse. Each one individually is a bad sign, but all three at once mean Armageddon is nigh.

    Luckily, he failed in his mission because the window was too heavy for him to lift. But that didn’t stop him from trying.

    Here he is, just like the velociraptors on Jurassic Park, testing the window for weak spots. Clever boy.

    No.
    NO.
    NOOOOO.

  • Le miracle du printemps

    Oh. Mon. Dieu. A spring equinox miracle has taken place at Le Château.

    I was somewhat reluctant to mention it for fear of jinxing it, but I’m going to take a chance. What’s the worst that could happen (apart from plunging back into the unending purgatory that had become our existence prior to this day)?

    As you know, since Louis Catorze’s first dental surgery in September, we have been adding water to his Orijen to soften it. This was only supposed to be temporary whilst he healed, but the little sod decided that this was how he wanted it forever. Then he didn’t. Then he did again. Then he wanted water heated to 70 degrees. Then he wanted boiling water. You get the idea.

    Now that he has had his second dental surgery, I was about to devise a complicated plan for gradually reducing the water by 0.001 millilitre/degree increments when Cat Daddy cheerfully informed me that he had already served Catorze a couple of portions of completely dry food. And, apparently, Catorze had eaten them.

    This sounded far too good to be true. But, when I tried it myself, Saint Jésus et tous ses anges: I had the same result.

    No more will we have to throw away untold quantities of rejected Orijen when our serving skills haven’t been up to scratch. No more will we have to boil the kettle multiple times a day, only to use a minuscule amount of the water each time. No more will we have to tell non-resident chat-sitteurs to visit 78 times a day and to give him 0.4 teaspoonfuls of food per visit, sprinkled with 4.73ml water heated to 100 degrees. And no more will the silly sod starve himself rather than consume one pellet of unsatisfactorily-watered food. This is all très big news indeed.

    As well as feeling elated beyond belief, I also feel guilty because, despite everything, my gut tells me that Catorze was doing this because he was in discomfort. If he were only doing it to be a contrary shite, I’m sure he would have strung it out for a lot longer.

    Feeding Sa Maj is now a delight. We dish up the dry food, and he eats it. And, because he’s no longer suffering, he’s eating more.

    Cat Daddy: “So we’ve spent £1,000 on surgery so that he can eat more of the most expensive food on the planet. Great. That’s money well spent.”

    A spring in his step. And in his appetite.

  • Le pouvoir du vaisseau mère

    The Mothership seems to be beaming very clear “Go apeshit” messages to the feline population at the moment. This is not good.

    Louis Catorze, still full of the post-steroid munchies, has been more of a pain than I can possibly describe, with Cat Daddy describing his all-day screaming as “beyond a joke”. Catorze’s French frère-from-another-mère, Antoine, is also behaving oddly, bouncing around on the kitchen worktop (where he’s not allowed). However, the prize for the absolute worst goes to Catorze’s cat-cousin King Ghidorah who, after overgrooming a relatively minor scratch into something awful, raised merry hell throughout my sister’s efforts to fix him.

    King Ghidorah was booked for a 3:30pm appointment with the vet one afternoon and, naturellement, when it was time to leave, he was nowhere to be seen.

    My sister hunted in all the usual and unusual places but to no avail, then had to make the Call of Shame to inform the vet that she wouldn’t be coming because she didn’t know where her cat was. Most vets are quite used to this, but that doesn’t make it any less embarrassing when you’re the one having to make that call.

    King Ghidorah eventually rolled in a couple of hours after the appointment, not giving a single shite about the upset caused. My sister hastily packaged him up, then called the vet to ask whether they had any availability that evening.

    They didn’t.

    So she had to unpackage him again, and her next-door neighbour later sent her this:

    “Mwahahahahaha!”

    Oui, Mesdames et Messieurs: after royally stuffing up the afternoon, he spent the early evening sitting on the neighbours’ skylight, creepily spying on them and (most likely) sniggering with glee at the success of his dastardly plan.

    If you think your cat is behaving normally, be warned that there’s a full moon coming. It won’t last.

    UPDATE: King Ghidorah made it to the vet eventually and it turns out that, despite regular Advocatting, he has fleas, no doubt from his numerous scraps with dodgy members of the feral gang living in the badlands of SE20. Hopefully the steroid shot to stop the itching, and the change of flea medication from Advocate to something stronger, will see him well again.

  • Une histoire brève des dents

    As you are aware, the snout-swelling that Louis Catorze experienced after his dental surgery concealed his famous fangs. The swelling has now receded but I still don’t see the fangs returning to their former glory.

    I recently overheard Cat Daddy saying to Catorze, “Your fangs are coming back, aren’t they, Louis-boy?” to which he replied with a little “Mwah!” The friend who chat-sat him when we went to Norwich, is also certain that they’re back, as is another friend who visited us the weekend before. So, curiously, others can see them. I seem to be the only one who can’t.

    Cat Daddy, grabbing Catorze’s head and pulling back his top lip like an over-zealous dentist: “What do you mean, you can’t see his fangs? Look! LOOK!” (Interestingly, Catorze just hangs compliantly in his hand whilst he does this. If I did this same thing to administer medication, it would be a gladiatorial fight to the death.)

    Well, obviously I can see them when he does THAT. But, when the little sod is pitter-pattering about his daily business, somehow his fangs don’t seem prominent.

    Is my eyesight failing? Is everyone else’s? Or are the fangs interdimensional objects which, like Catorze, can travel through wormholes in time and space, appearing and disappearing at will? Will the imminent full moon be the deliverer of the answers to some of these life mysteries, or will she simply bring more questions?

    Only Sa Maj knows, and he ain’t telling.

    This was Catorze before his dental surgery, pictured on some wall graffiti that we spotted in Norwich.

  • Morceaux cassés d’une chose

    Most pet owners will admit that they look after their animals better than they look after themselves, and I am no exception. When I visited the doctor recently about my recurrent headaches*, the consultation went something like this:

    Doctor: “For how long have you been getting these headaches?”

    Me: “I don’t know.”

    Her: “How often do you get them?”

    Me: “I don’t know.”

    Her: “How long does each one last?”

    Me: “I don’t know.”

    Her: “When was the most recent one?”

    Me: “I don’t know.”

    [Silence, tumbleweed, crickets]

    *Mum, if you are reading this, don’t worry. Everything is fine.

    Now, had these been Louis Catorze’s headaches and not mine, I would have immediately been able to say that the he’d had them every 3.4 days for the last three weeks, that they lasted 22 minutes on average and that the last one started two days ago at 8:43am.

    Last week, once again I demonstrated the extent to which we put our little sods first. After stuffing my face with salted caramel cheesecake, I decided that I wanted more cheesecake. However, when I opened the fridge, the cheesecake dish slid out and fell onto the floor.

    Scientists may well tell us that matter cannot both implode and explode at once – or, if it did, the two would cancel each other out – but clearly they have never dropped a dish of cheesecake on the kitchen floor. Because I was a couple of glasses of Crémant under, both my clean-up efforts and my judgement were pretty shambolic; after a perfunctory sweep with the dustpan and brush, I tried to salvage a couple of spoonfuls of cheesecake from the mess and only stopped when I realised I was crunching on glass**.

    **Mum, if you are reading this, don’t worry. Everything is fine.

    Cat Daddy, a few minutes later: “Did you clean up all the glass from the floor?”

    Me, aware that I probably hadn’t: “Yeah.”

    Him: “Are you sure?”

    Me, pouring myself some more Crémant: “Uh-huh.”

    Him: “I really hope so. We can’t have HIM hurting his little paws.”

    HIS LITTLE PAWS. OH. MON. DIEU.

    Before Cat Daddy could even draw breath I was scouring the floor for fragments of glass, looking at the same spots multiple times from different angles to see if I could catch them glinting. I picked up every single piece by hand, threw them away, then did another sweep with the dustpan and brush AND a further sober sweep the next morning. We have broken glass countless times in this house and Catorze has never come a cropper, but HIS LITTLE PAWS.

    Lessons learned have been as follows:

    1. The universe has ways of letting me know that one helping of cheesecake is enough.

    2. I would – and did – crawl over broken glass for Catorze. And doesn’t he look appreciative?

    Smug little sod and his weird tail.

  • La peau de chagrin (Partie 2)

    Louis Catorze’s skin problem is returning.

    The fur around his eyes is thinning, and this is the familiar, telltale sign that all could turn to merde if we aren’t careful. In fact, it could very well turn to merde even if we ARE careful. Since we don’t know what causes it, we are still at a loss as to what we’re supposed to do.

    We had a feeling that this would happen since he only had a short-acting steroid shot the last time, but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating. He wasn’t allowed to have a steroid shot within two weeks of his surgery, nor too close to his Loxicom, so we have been waiting until the earliest opportunity, which was yesterday (as advised by the vet). I was stuck at work so Cat Daddy took Catorze, and the vet, who hadn’t seen the little sod before, called him a “noisy boy”. TRUST US, WE KNOW.

    At least now he’s done … just in time for the full moon next week, which isn’t ideal as we could do without double the level of psycho, but Cat Daddy and I are just going to have to stock up on vodka and ride this one out.

    If you have ever had a black cat in your life, you will know that the their eyebrow area can look perfectly normal from certain angles, and almost bald from other angles, and Catorze is no exception. The two pictures below were taken by his chat-sitteur last weekend, and they look very different indeed, so it’s hard to know from taking photos whether or not he is improving. However, if he’s eating (check), drinking (check), screaming (check) and being a complete and utter pest (HELL, check), I think we can be reassured that he is fine.

    Looking a bit scruffy and threadbare here.
    Not looking too bad here.

  • Ne l’oublions pas

    Cat Daddy and I have just returned from a weekend away watching Brentford play Norwich. Louis Catorze was left in the care of a chat-sitting friend and, apart from The Curious Incident of the Bubble Wrap in the Night-Time and a LOT of creepy-staring and screaming, he was the perfect host.

    Best not to even ask.

    In somewhat related news – well, linking tenuously to football and cats – we really aren’t about to forgive Kurt Zouma anytime soon. During that first match against Wolves, when fans were booing him, I wondered if people would have the energy or the inclination to keep it up for ninety minutes. It seems that I underestimated the elephantine memory of the British public, because we’ve all managed to keep it up for a whole month.

    On Saturday West Ham played Liverpool away, and even Cat Daddy, who doesn’t like Liverpool football club, had to raise a smile at these scenes at and around Anfield:

    I will even pardon the lack of apostrophe. (Picture from worldsportstale.com.)
    Terrifying but nonetheless a flash of genius. (Picture from si.com.)

    Scousers, we applaud you. Please pass the baton to the Brummies and encourage them to do something equally brilliant when Aston Villa play West Ham at the weekend.

    It’s another month before West Ham come to Brentford, and I’m already giving serious consideration to a placard saying “Zouma, may I have your shirt (so that my cat can wipe his arse on it)?” Best of all, Catorze even knows how to say that in Zouma’s language: French.