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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.

  • La vie serait tragique si elle n’était pas drôle

    There are two main schools of thought regarding a black cat crossing one’s path: either good luck is on its way, or everything is about to turn to merde.

    I was of the former but, since various misfortunes befell us during our weekend away, I am less sure. And the fact that it was also a full moon, no doubt, made everything worse.

    Not actually that well hidden. Whatever.

    After an excruciating journey full of traffic jams and detours, we arrived at our destination just in time to catch the pub before 9pm, when it stopped serving food. As we walked there we met a plushy little black cat, not much bigger than Louis Catorze, who squeaked at me and let me stroke her.

    Cat Daddy: “A black cat crossing our path. Not good.”

    Me: “Don’t be silly. They’re good luck.”

    The pub had decided to stop serving food half an hour earlier than usual, so we missed out. We returned to our rental apartment and ordered a takeaway but Driver Christian didn’t deliver it, despite the app’s claim that he did, and Deliveroo have now conveniently suspended Cat Daddy’s account due to “suspicious activity” (?).

    During the wait for our third attempt at food, Cat Daddy consumed what my niece would call “a non-reasonable amount” of Pinot Grigio, and that was when things seriously nosedived.

    I asked Cat Daddy to make me a cup of tea, and he thought the kettle was one of those stove-top whistling ones. It wasn’t; it was just a normal one that you switch on. He put it on the hob, left it unattended for a couple of minutes and it caught fire, splattering molten plastic everywhere.

    Me: “We’re going to have to tell [the owners of the flat] what happened.”

    Cat Daddy: “WHAT? You’d be a useless criminal. You’d be the first one running to the police to confess.”

    Me: “But if they notice anything, which they will, we’ll need to say SOMETHING.”

    Cat Daddy: “It’ll be fine. I’ll just tell them that nothing happened and that we didn’t burn the kettle.”

    Me: “…”

    Cat Daddy: “It’s that ****ing black cat, I’m telling you.”

    Me: “…”

    Cat Daddy: “And it’s your fault, too, because you’re the one who wanted tea.”

    Me: “…”

    Thanks to the impressive clean-up job by two of our family members, involving scraping dripping plastic off the surfaces with a spoon, we managed to make the place look passably presentable. The next day, instead of having a relaxed brunch, Cat Daddy and I drove around a town that we didn’t know, looking for a kettle identical to the one he’d torched and also a washing-up bowl to replace the one that didn’t survive the molten plastic attack.

    This time luck was on our side and, unbelievably, we found them.

    The apartment now has a new kettle and washing-up bowl, the old ones have been wiped of fingerprints and are sleeping with the fishes, and, after some nifty work with an emery board (in lieu of sandpaper) on the wooden surface splodges, nobody would know that there had been a mishap.

    Meanwhile, back in TW8, Louis Catorze was perfectly angelic for Blue the Smoke Bengal’s mamma, draping himself all over her during her visits, eating all his food and refraining from escaping out at The Front. Was our chain of disasters the fault of the squeaky holiday cat … or did Catorze cause some sort of butterfly-effect space-time fabric warp by behaving impeccably elsewhere?

    Two lessons have been learned from this calamitous saga:

    1. Cat Daddy knows that he can trust us to bury bodies for him. Not that he’s planning to murder anyone. But, y’know, just in case.

    2. If you try to escape from one bastard black cat, its or another’s bullshittery will still find you.

    “Don’t blame moi. Not ma faute.”

  • Le chat de la fromagerie

    Cat Daddy took this picture when he was at the Westcombe Cheddar dairy not long ago.

    I would also look this smug if I lived in a dairy.

    Now, for most normal cats, living in a place where they make cheese must be the most wonderful thing on earth. I know that dairy isn’t great for cats but, if your cat is generally healthy, I don’t think the occasional sliver does them any harm. And, let’s face it, they will bug us for it whether it’s good for them or not.

    However, Louis Catorze has ridiculously stringent standards when it comes to human food, and most cheese doesn’t interest him in the slightest. In many ways this makes our lives easier as we can leave anything lying around and trust him not to eat it. However, it can make bribery very difficult as he won’t accept just any old thing as a pill conduit … and you can be sure that, if he takes to something for a short while, he will inexplicably stop.

    Here is a summary of his OUI list:

    ⁃ Organic aged Comté

    ⁃ Jambon de Bayonne

    ⁃ Jamón Ibérico

    ⁃ Pâté de Bruxelles (although not for long; he soon tires of this)

    ⁃ Tuna rillettes (ditto)

    ⁃ Medium-rare fillet steak

    And his NON list:

    ⁃ Cheddar

    ⁃ Jambon de campagne

    ⁃ Jamón Serrano

    ⁃ Any type of pâté or pâté-like product not mentioned abve

    ⁃ Well-done fillet steak (although I can’t blame him on this one)

    I think Catorze would be a very useful dairy employee; he would never attempt to steal the product, plus he has a built-in anti-contaminant alarm due to his skill of bird-chattering at impinging bugs. That said, it will be a cold day in hell before he WORKS for a living.

    “Je ne veux pas travailler.”

  • Il est top-model et il est beau

    Puppy Mamma has a craft business selling all manner of delightful things, and she has just gone live on Not On The High Street. If you live in the U.K. (we do) and know any pets who have been good this year (we don’t), I highly recommend her personalised, handmade pet decorations.

    For reasons that I cannot comprehend, Puppy Mamma wanted Louis Catorze to model for her page. I know. We didn’t get it, either. I did warn her that he was the worst photographic model on the planet, but she didn’t listen. She came over one afternoon to photograph Sa Maj with his decoration … and, naturellement, the little sod posed beautifully for her. I was both very proud and sick to my stomach.

    Here is Puppy Mamma’s page on Not On The High Street, featuring Gizzy the [insert name of species], Sooty (Puppy Mamma’s next-door babysit cat) and Sa Maj. Cat Daddy now can’t stop humming a certain Kraftwerk* song, and is deciding what his boy’s fee should be.

    *Younger followers: ask your grandparents.

    This is how he poses for me.

  • Le parc à chiens

    I have just had the last of my set of cycling lessons with Cat Daddy’s friend Gerard. (It was supposed to happen ages ago, but then I had appendicitis and somehow I haven’t got around to rearranging it until now.)

    We usually choose Monday morning as our cycling day, because there are fewer people in the parks than on a weekend. However: DOGS. Mon Dieu. Cycling in a park with dogs is like cycling in and out of moving land mines.

    The horrors we were forced to endure during our last session included the following:

    1. A russet-coloured sausage dog who sat stone-still in the middle of the path whilst his human was on the phone*, then sprang out in front of me just as we attempted to overtake him. The human did apologise but it was a dismissive kind of “Sorry” … and she remained on the phone.

    2. A large, honey-coloured Labrador-type beast who chased us, barking, whilst his human was on the phone*. Gerard decided to bark back at him, which scared him witless and sent him packing.

    3. A brown and white spaniel-type thing who offered us his stick, whilst his human was on the phone*. Gerard picked it up and threw it just a fraction of a second before his brain informed him that doing so was a legally-binding contract and that, from that moment onwards, he was obliged to keep throwing the stick forever more. We then had to cycle extra fast to get away from him.

    *Do you see a pattern emerging here?

    Cats, surely, are less trouble than this? Well, ok, Louis Catorze isn’t. But most normal cats are, right?

    Catorze can be seen here, pondering that question and also wondering exactly who these “normal cats” might be:

    Sa Maj says “normal” is overrated.

  • Qu’il mange de la brioche

    Cat Daddy and I are going away later this month, and Blue the Smoke Bengal’s mamma will be on Louis Catorze duty during our absence.

    We are feeling both relief at the prospect of getting away from his nonsense for a couple of days, and moderate anxiety in case he plays up on her watch. Blue is a very easy cat to look after, with just dry food and water (plus the odd pigeon but, since he puts them under his mamma’s bed and cat-sitting duties don’t stretch to looking there, it’s her problem and not mine). Catorze is, erm, rather more complicated.

    Yesterday Blue’s mamma came over for dinner and for her Roi orientation, and I wasn’t especially looking forward to telling her that she would need to come in 48 times a day, each time dispensing 0.125 scoops of food sprinkled with 6.3ml of water heated to exactly 100 degrees. Luckily, after a few glasses of Crémant, she seemed to take it quite well. At worst, if he refuses to eat for the entire time that we’re away, he can just live off his body fat like a hibernating grizzly bear (but a much smaller one, obviously).

    Here he is, having decided to do an Insulate Britain-style sit-down protest this time. I wouldn’t put it past him to have glued himself to the floor:

    “Feed moi.”

  • Le repos de l’âme

    After a month of partying in the run-up to Hallowe’en, my liver is dying. So I am firmly on the wagon until at least the end of the month, longer if I can manage it, and I have resumed the exercise regime that had fallen by the wayside.

    Louis Catorze – who, incidentally, is still brimming with energy, despite having partied twice as hard as the rest of us – is profoundly displeased about this. The exercise, I mean. Obviously he doesn’t know what the wagon is, nor does he know whether or not I am on it, nor would he give a hoot if he did.

    That said, he doesn’t even give a hoot about the exercise as such. He is only displeased about it because it’s a change to his morning routine, and therefore it’s an inconvenience to him. Normally I would be sipping tea at 6:30am with him on my lap, but these days he has to find his own entertainment a couple of times a week whilst I do my step and weights workout. And, on the last few occasions, what passed for “entertainment” in his world was circling my step as I did my sit-ups, screaming his lungs out.

    Yes, he has been accidentally hit on the rump with a dumbbell and/or kettlebell numerous times. No, it doesn’t deter him in the slightest.

    Obviously I don’t have my camera in my hands when he’s doing the circling and screaming. But this picture, taken by Cat Daddy, shows exactly the sort of face he gives me:

    Look at that gap where the lower fang used to be.

  • Un chat noir qui n’y est pas

    It was time to de-flea Louis Catorze the other day and, naturellement, he had disappeared.

    Cat Daddy: “Have you done the deed yet?”

    Me: “I don’t know where he is.”

    Him: “I thought you said he’d gone into the guest room?” [This is his new favourite sleeping spot.]

    Me: “He did. But he’s not there now.”

    Him: “Maybe he’s in our room, or in the attic?”

    Me: “I’ve looked. He’s not. And it’s really annoying because I’ve taken the stopper off the Broadline and, once it’s off, you can’t put it back on again. So I’m going to have to balance it precariously upright until we find him again.”

    15 minutes later:

    Cat Daddy: “He *is* in the guest room. Go and look again.”

    I went to check and, after some effort, discovered Catorze asleep on a pile of Cat Daddy’s just-washed cycling gear, nestled into a black top where I couldn’t see him. LITTLE SOD HAD CATMOUFLAGED HIMSELF.

    Où est Le Roi?

    Anyway, he was most displeased when I got him, letting out his raspy old man scowl. And, of course, he has now rolled both the Broadline and his own cruddy self onto the cycling clothes, so we are going to have to wash them again. He could do with a bit of a wash himself, too, because nothing is more icky than a freshly-Broadlined Catorze who has tried to roll off the liquid.

    I once described the post-Broadline Catorze to a friend as “looking as if a fish has crawled onto his back and died there”. And I think these photos – taken when he tried to also roll the liquid onto the attic bed – confirm it:

    Yuck.
    Vile.

  • Aimer ou ne pas aimer?

    Diwali and Bonfire Night have, once again, been and gone without incident. Louis Catorze was startled by one bang for about 0.6 seconds and then forgot about it, appearing not to even notice that there was any further noise. This is very good news indeed and we are fully aware of how lucky we are.

    Meanwhile, Cat Daddy is trying to get to grips with the labyrinthine twists and turns of, erm, Instagram. Not long ago he received a notification that I had posted a photo of Catorze.

    Cat Daddy: “How do I Like this picture?”

    Me: “You click on the heart.”

    Him: “But it’s a bit obvious if I Like it, isn’t it? It’s like cronyism.”

    [Silence, tumbleweed, crickets.]

    Me: “You might be overthinking this a little.”

    Him: “What if I dislike the picture?”

    Me: “It’s Louis! You can’t dislike your boy.”

    Him: “What if I want to give him a thumbs down?”

    Me: “You can’t. There isn’t a thumbs down on Instagram. I guess you’d just have to scroll past.”

    Him: “Anyway, look at the state of his whiskers. It’s an absolutely awful picture.”

    Me: “You took it.”

    [Stonier silence, more tumbleweed, noisier crickets.]

    Luckily Catorze couldn’t give a merde about who likes him and who doesn’t. Sometimes – admittedly not very often, but sometimes – I think we should all try to be a bit more like Catorze.

    This is the picture that caused Cat Daddy such offence: a black and white version of the one featured in the 16th October post about les fangs.

  • Le Manoir au Cat

    Cat Daddy and I went to dinner at Le Manoir last week, after he drunk-bid for it in an online charity auction during the first lockdown. As far as drunken purchases go, I’ve seen worse.

    Usually it would have been no problem leaving Louis Catorze alone for just one night. However, now that he insists on a boiling water chaser for his Orijen, and refuses to eat it if it’s been sitting around for more than 0.3 seconds, that makes things more complicated. So we asked our cleaning lady if she would mind feeding him when she stopped by that evening. (Yes, this same cleaning lady. Unbelievably, she is still here.)

    Le Manoir was a delight, and Raymond Blanc even more so. However, due to dodgy O2 phone reception, I wasn’t able to read my notifications until the next morning, and I glimpsed one from our cleaning lady saying, “Don’t worry, he’s home now.”

    Merde.

    Apparently the Sureflap had been malfunctioning again, with the little sod able to go out but not come in. At the time of messaging the previous night, it had worked. But no doubt he would have gone back out at some point, and we had no idea if he’d made it in again. And it was bucketing down with rain. Not the best start to Le Roi’s Long Hallowe’en weekend, trapped outside, drenched and screaming.

    Worse yet, our new neighbours had moved in a couple of days beforehand and we didn’t want him going over and bothering them. (We have met them once and they are lovely people. Regretfully they have also met Catorze, right after he’d had his steroid shot – as in, less than an hour afterwards – when he was manic, bug-eyed and screaming.)

    We realised that there wasn’t much we could do if Catorze had, indeed, been outside all night. However, instead of a leisurely countryside route home, taking in the beautiful autumn colours, we thought it wise to go direct via the motorway, and the rain helped us to make our decision. We were about halfway home when I received another message from our cleaning lady, saying “Everything was ok. Sorry for bothering you. It was my mistake.”

    We imagine that the little sod had been up to his old tricks, wailing piteously outside the patio doors, rearing up on his hind legs and pawing at the glass, when he knows perfectly well that the Sureflap is there but is too lazy to use it. He wasn’t trapped or distressed. He was just taking the piss.

    When we arrived home, he was indoors and perfectly happy apart from the fact that his bowl was empty. And his Sureflap was, and is, functioning as it should.

    At least we didn’t receive the notifications in real time, and have to decide whether to leave the company of one fancy French gentleman and dash home to rescue another. But we’re still cross with him.

    “About time. Maintenant feed moi.”

  • La chance d’être un chat noir

    Hallowe’en is over for another year. Louis Catorze had an absolute blast, and luckily we only had to manage one (1) escape out at The Front, just a minute or two after sunset.

    The little sod was on top form for his big weekend. In fact, come to think of it, he has been on top form ever since autumn started. This is somewhat unusual for him; although we often refer to his rising psycho levels during La Saison du Chat Noir, his skin and fur are usually at their best in the summer. However, this June, July and August, he appeared to get worse, not better, forcing us to continue his steroid treatment through the summer for the first time. And, despite the drugs, he still managed to look like something that had just crawled out from under a bridge, to the point where we had to be VERY careful of escapes out at The Front in case some well-meaning citizen scooped him up and took him to an animal rescue.

    At this point we resigned ourselves to the fact that age was catching up with him, and that autumn would, most likely, see him deteriorate further still. However, in actual fact the reverse happened and he smartened up. His gross dandruff, which had started to return since we stopped the beauty oil, has disappeared, he’s started to gain weight (3.27kg now), and his fur is thick and glossy.

    It could be the Orijen, or the daily blastings with the purifying beeswax candles (yes, I’m still doing that). Most likely it’s the drugs. But Sa Maj has never spent an autumn looking this good. Whatever the reason, we will take it.

    Hallowe’en may have come to an end, but let’s hope it’s not the end of this black kitty’s run of good luck.

    Off to seek more mischief and bullshittery.

  • Quelque chose de méchant arrive

    For someone who has such a deep interest in ghosts and spirits, I am surprisingly unintuitive. My mum and my late great-aunt have a long and colourful catalogue of paranormal encounters, but I haven’t seen much that couldn’t be explained in some boring terrestrial way.

    However, this still doesn’t stop me from searching for signs that Le Château may be haunted. Even though it’s not. Coincidentally, almost all of these signs also indicate that a certain troublemaking black cat is at large:

    ⁃ Strange noises: check

    ⁃ Waking up at 3am: check

    ⁃ Furniture and objects out of place: check (as well as pulling my shirts off their hangers on Wednesday night whilst they were drying around the room, Louis Catorze is also a fan of opening guests’ cases whilst they sleep and silently flinging their stuff all over the floor)

    ⁃ Increased nightmares: check (both whilst asleep and whilst awake)

    ⁃ Disturbances in electricity: check (assuming we can count a non-functioning television among those things)

    ⁃ Temperature fluctuations: check (a 3kg cat can generate a surprising amount of heat when he’s sleeping on your chest)

    ⁃ Pets behaving oddly: HELL, check

    ⁃ Inexplicable voices: partial check, as there are, indeed, voices, but they are usually very explicable (Catorze screaming, Cat Daddy using Unrepeatable Expletives of the Worst Kind and That Neighbour knocking at the door to bring Catorze home after yet another escape out at The Front)

    As Long Hallowe’en unfolds, no doubt there will be more of the above. Perhaps we will never know which ones are being caused by poltergeists and which by Le Roi, but I know that poltergeists would be less of a nuisance.

    Here is Catorze, wishing everyone a Joyeuse Fête and reminding the world that there’s only room for one demonic entity in this house. Happy Long Hallowe’en to you all.

    “From the sky will come a great king of terror” (Nostradamus).

  • Arroser le repas royal

    After a couple of weeks of happily eating dry Orijen, Louis Catorze has decided that he would like it dampened down again.

    I was worried that he was in pain and/or having difficulty eating. However, when he saw the vet for his steroid shot and I asked them to check his teeth just in case, they confirmed that there was nothing wrong with him. So he doesn’t have a medical reason for requiring dampened-down Orijen. He’s just being a shit.

    It gets worse: it seems that, this time around, he wants the water chaser to be boiling, and not 70 degrees. (Don’t worry: once the water hits his cold bowl it cools immediately, leaving the food comfortable enough to eat.) And he will only eat it if the boiling water was just poured a couple of seconds previously. Longer than a minute or two beforehand and it’s a firm NON.

    No doubt by the time this goes live, he will have changed his mind again about what he wants. That said, he has surely been through every possible permutation of Orijen-in-water and there’s nothing further we can add/change, other than perhaps deciding that the boiling water chaser must be made from “aged ice” (a chunk chipped off a millennia-old Antarctic glacier, flown here in a refrigerated light aircraft, melted down and poured into our kettle).

    In not-much-better news, the sittings for his 2021 Official Hallowe’en Portrait have been beyond a joke. Despite the genius idea of placing the pumpkin in Catorze’s prime creepy staring position, we have had mostly grim disasters plus a couple that were passable but nothing special. I think we are going to have to cheat with the final version by Noir-filtering the hell out of a photo that Cat Daddy took earlier this year.

    Nooo.
    For goodness’ sake.
    Pretending to pose but is actually creepy-staring for food.
    “Joyeuse Halloween. Now feed moi.”
    Artsy in a strange sort of way.
    I have no words for this.

  • La naissance du chat noir

    Not long ago, Cat Daddy and I watched a nature documentary which featured underwater creatures who have evolved to be blind. And fair enough; there is no point in having eyes if you live several miles under the sea in pitch darkness. It is hard to understand how nature can be so clever in this way, yet also so stupid. For instance, how did we start out with the lion, the king of beasts, and end up with the domestic cat, an animal who would rather starve than eat from an unsatisfactory bowl, and who would go thirsty if not served fresh water in a glass?

    I’m not joking. When Catorze first came to live with us, the rescue told us that he would only drink from a glass and not a bowl. We thought, “What utter nonsense. He’ll get thirsty enough eventually, and then he’ll HAVE to drink from a bowl.”

    Nope. He didn’t.

    He happily let himself turn into a brittle husk of a thing that crumbled to dust if touched, before we weak-willed humans cracked first and gave him a glass.

    According to National Geographic, humans didn’t domesticate cats; cats decided to domesticate themselves. It seems that, after realising that mice and rats were attracted to our agricultural processes, the cats sensibly decided to move themselves to where the prey was, i.e. near us. No doubt at this point they realised just how pathetic we were, and collectively decided to exploit that forever more.

    Black cats are not descended from panthers, as I had always imagined, and are, in fact, something of a freak of nature. When I watched MonsterQuest (see below), all about black panther sightings in the wild, the genomic diversity expert told us that black is not only recessive but a rare genetic mutation. His very words were, “Every hundred generations you’re going to get one [a wild black cat] by chance. What are the chances of me seeing it? One in a million.” Big black cats seen in the wild are, apparently, far more likely to have dark spots on a dark background (mistaken for solid colour), or to be large domestic cats or “escapees from private collections” (my mind is truly boggled as to exactly what this could mean).

    Then things took a darkly disturbing turn.

    In the same episode of MonsterQuest, the historian told us about when black cats started to appear in literature and art. I have transcribed him word for word, mainly to reassure myself that I did not imagine this:

    “The black cat comes in … in a series of documents about certain kinds of heretics … At a certain point when the heretics have been praying for a while, a black cat comes down a rope into the middle of the room and is worshipped by these people. And one of their forms of worship turns out to be kissing the black cat under its tail …”

    Excusez-moi?

    “In other words, on its anus …”

    Noooooo.

    “And therefore this black cat is taken to be either a demon or the devil.”

    So black cats originated from hell; no surprise there. But I had to watch the preceding bits over and over again, with subtitles, to be sure that I had heard correctly.

    No, no, no. This is just wrong.

    Perhaps this explains why Catorze struts around with his tail up all the time. Cat Daddy always believed it to be some strange birth defect, but maybe this is a throwback to the days of his 13th century ancestors. Anyway, if he’s angling for a kiss, he’s better take a seat because he’s in for a long wait.

    For some interesting historical facts about the domestication of cats, please check out this link: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/06/domesticated-cats-dna-genetics-pets-science/

    And, for black cat information ranging from cool and mysterious to downright offensive, have a look at MonsterQuest season 1, episode 4: “Lions in the Backyard” on Prime Video.

  • Vous aimez les films d’horreur?

    Merci à Dieu: it’s half term. And the October break would not be complete without horror films.

    Here at Le Château we enjoy them all year round, but they are especially pleasurable in the run-up to the best day of the year. Even Cat Daddy can be partial to the odd horror film in October, although he detests violence and gore (therefore not really getting what horror is meant to be about) and prefers to stick to the old classics or “the ones that have a good rating on Squashed Tomatoes” (which is what he thinks Rotten Tomatoes is called).

    There are quite a few “Cats watching horror films” videos doing the rounds on social media and, whilst some of them are funny, it does seem a bit mean to deliberately scare cats for the amusement of strangers on the internet. What a good thing, then, that Louis Catorze is utterly unafraid of scary movies, which means I can watch what I like around him.

    I have carried out extensive research with Sa Maj over the years to monitor his responses to various sub-genres within the main umbrella of horror, and my findings are listed below (on a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 meaning no reaction whatsoever and 10 indicating that his “Urge To Kill” switch has been activated):

    • Zombies: 0
    • Werewolves: 0
    • Poltergeists: 0
    • Serial killers (including screaming victims): 0
    • Demonic possession and/or exorcism: 0
    • Psycho barking dogs infected with alien pathogen: 0
    • Disfigured, cannibalistic mountain dwellers: 0
    • Creepy children and their even creepier “imaginary” friends: 0
    • Ancient Egyptian ghosts unleashed from their tombs by archaeologists who should have minded their own business: 0
    • Vampires: 2 (purring and slow-blinking, presumably recognising them as his distant ancestors)
    • Crickets chirping on a moonlit night: 10
    • Seagulls (during an episode of X Files set in a coastal town): 10

    This is by no means an exhaustive list as, no doubt, there are other sub-genres that I have not yet explored. Somehow it doesn’t seem quite so cruel doing this to a cat who has no idea how to be frightened so, if you have any other suggestions that you would like me to try out on the little sod, please let me know.

    Oh. Mon. Dieu.