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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.

  • Le plateau à fromages

    Cat Daddy and I placed an order for our festive cheese board this week.

    When making our selection, I was dangerously close to choosing some Comté because Louis Catorze likes it, but then I slapped myself around the chops and told myself not to be so stupid. I then recalled the wearisome time when we were still pilling Catorze, and I had to start making his Trojan Horses from Comté because he had begun to tire of Reflets de France tuna rillettes.

    I often berate parents who raise fussy eater kids and yet there I was, waiting for the Comté to come to room temperature so that I could pill my cat. If you have never used Comté for this purpose – and, let’s face it, who has? – it’s not easy. Its waxy texture makes it quite hard to mould and, rather like damp sand, the more you work it, the more crumbly it becomes. Something like Brie would have much easier, but of course the little sod won’t eat that.

    Eventually I took the Trojan Horse up to our bed, where Catorze was sleeping, and I presented it to him. After a couple of licks the whole thing disintegrated completely, sending bits of cheese rolling into the folds of the duvet, so I had to Greco him.

    Me, to Cat Daddy, immediately after the event: “I’ve just had to pick bits of Comté out of the duvet.”

    Him, without looking up from his phone: “No wonder you can’t sleep at night if you’re eating cheese in bed.”

    Me: “What? Nooo. It wasn’t for me, it was for his pill. I just had to Greco him because he wouldn’t eat it.”

    [Catorze enters the room and goes straight to his daddy to snitch.]

    Cat Daddy, actually looking up from his phone to cuddle his boy: “Aww. I know, Louis. I don’t like Comté much, either.”

    [Silence, tumbleweed, crickets.]

    A week or so later, after further refusals, my Trojan Horse was finally eaten very happily when I bought a new slab of Comté. I then realised that the little sod had been refusing the earlier ones because I had used Marks and Spencer Comté and not the organic aged stuff from the deli.

    Anyway, our order is pictured below, penned in the hand of the delightful Dom from the deli (alliteration entirely accidental), and we will be collecting it on the 23rd. I already know that Catorze won’t eat any of these, but tant pis pour lui.

    Yes, that does say 750g (seven hundred and fifty grams) of Gouda with cumin. Please don’t judge us.
    “Où est mon Comté?”

  • Ce n’est pas seulement un lit

    After coming back from Louis Catorze’s vet appointment on Tuesday, Cat Daddy and I debated how and when to Gabapentin him.

    Cat Daddy: “You could do it in the morning.”

    Me: “But that’s when he and I have our morning cuddles. Plus it means my day starts with a stress.”

    Him: “How about when you come home?”

    Me: “…”

    Him: “…”

    Me: “Can’t you do it?”

    Him: “But then he’ll hate me. He needs to have one of us that he can trust.”

    [Silence, tumbleweed, crickets.]

    Anyway, I drew the short straw and I’m the bad guy. It’s not fun. But if I do it in the morning, because the little sod has the Post-Steroid Hungries, it seems I’m forgiven quite quickly.

    In other news 9,083 sleeping spots aren’t enough, and you simply have to look for one more. Preferably one that isn’t anywhere near as nice as the others.

    This is one of those times.

    For reasons that we cannot fathom – and, quite frankly, nor do we want to – Catorze decided that, today, he wanted to sleep on the Marks and Spencer bag containing my nieces’ and nephews’ presents.

    Cats: why? And, please, don’t bother saying “Because cat”. That excuse just doesn’t wash anymore.

    I’m not even going to ask.

  • Un imbécile et son argent

    I am the worst person in the world. Not only did I forget to Broadline Louis Catorze this month but, when I finally remembered and went to his cupboard to take out a vial, I discovered that we were all out. Never in all my cats have I let this happen; I am usually meticulously organised when it comes to their health matters.

    Luckily I realised my mistake on the day of Catorze’s steroid shot, so I was able to email the vet and ask them to order in some Broadline and, in the meantime, to give him an emergency dose of whatever flea and worm medication they happened to have lying around. I know that lots of us let the treatments lapse, and some don’t do them at all, but this is Catorze: we all know very well that, if I don’t do it this month, given that he goes rummaging around in all manner of undesirable places, we will be spending the festive period dealing with the maman of all flea infestations, fixable only by setting fire to our soft furnishings, and worms crawling out of his arse end and mating with each other to make more worms.

    When it was time to leave for the appointment, despite having clung like a limpet to Cat Daddy all day long, Catorze had disappeared. We eventually found him hiding underneath a sheet that was drying in the dining room and, after the most undignified and unwieldy struggle hauling him out, with the little sod screaming his lungs out, we were able to stuff him into his transportation pod.

    One steroid shot, one flea and worm treatment and one Gabapentin (for his possible* continuing toothache) later, we were £138 down. I took Cat Daddy’s credit card into the surgery with me and he was most displeased when I had to run back out again to ask him for his PIN, because the bill came to over £100 and therefore I couldn’t do a contactless payment. There were Unrepeatable Expletives on the way home, but Sa Maj was utterly mute so at least I only had to listen to one of them.

    *It’s “possible” toothache because he wouldn’t let the vet look in his mouth, so she was unable to confirm it for sure. We now have to Gabapentin him and, if he eats more normally as a result, then most likely he did have toothache.

    The minute we arrived home, Catorze pretended to forgive me and to come for lap cuddles, but in reality he just wanted to roll the flea treatment all over a scarf that I’m knitting.

    And there is still the matter of the removal of his final troublesome tooth, which the vet suggested having in the New Year. I don’t suppose there is a “good” time for planning ruinously-expensive feline dental surgery. But January sure as heck isn’t it.

    Haemorrhaging money because of this little sod.

  • Le jouet du moment

    Louis Catorze is overflowing with energy at the moment.

    My friend: “It’s probably because of the steroid shot. He’ll calm down.”

    Me: “He hasn’t had his shot yet. He’s having it on Tuesday.”

    [Silence, tumbleweed, crickets.]

    He is also obsessed with his new toy. We play with him every night for about twenty minutes, in the hope that it will wear him out and that he will calm down during the night as a result.

    It doesn’t work.

    We are the ones who are worn out by the play, and Catorze is almost as much of a nuisance through the night as he is when he doesn’t have play. (Granted, his new-found love of his igloo helps in that respect, but he’s still utterly unhinged.)

    One night, after TWO evening play sessions of twenty minutes each, I awoke to hear him downstairs, scrabbling around with his toy, having dragged it out of the hiding place where we’d put it because we don’t trust him alone with it. When all eventually went quiet, I didn’t know whether to be relieved that we finally had some peace, or concerned in case he had hung or impaled himself. (I’m not sure whether any vampires throughout history have managed to do THEMSELVES in with a stake through the heart but, if anyone’s going to do it, it’s him.)

    At 5am, when I decided that I would go down and check on him, Sa Maj appeared upstairs. Then the screaming started, which was when I discovered that, even whilst asleep, Cat Daddy is capable of Unrepeatable Expletives of the Worst Kind.

    Here is the little sod, enjoying one of many play sessions that he had with our friend Emily recently. Yes, he is responsible for the white stringy bits pulled from the red rug. And, no, he never poses like this for me.

    Having fun with one of his favourite people.
    Bit of fang.

  • Les liens qui nous unissent

    Louis Catorze has just tangled himself up in his new toy. (See photo below – and, yes, I did deliberately choose pink.)

    Obviously we would have untangled him had he been in distress, but he wasn’t. In fact, he didn’t seem to notice that the cord was wrapped around him. Cat Daddy and I watched him at length, giggling a little and saying, “Any minute now he will realise.”

    Nope.

    The little sod took a break from play, went for a casual wander around the living room, then settled down on Cat Daddy’s lap, all the while remaining entangled and dragging the stick behind him. How on earth it could possibly have been comfortable is beyond me, but then we have never understood this beast and it’s unlikely that we will start now.

    Here is Sa Maj, blissfully unaware of his entrapment:

    Yes, that’s the wooden stick under his rump.

  • Le dernier mois

    It’s December and, whilst we haven’t had any snow in London, it’s cold.

    Louis Catorze is firmly back in his autumn-winter igloo. He has been known to spend all day in there, even foregoing food and drink (I am not overjoyed about this) and eventually crawling out at 9pm, all dishevelled and blinking at the light like a little cave gremlin, to sit on his daddy’s lap. For a while we were quite worried about him and almost whisked him off to the vet, but now normal service has resumed and he’s back to screaming and being a shite.

    Cat Daddy: “Maybe he wasn’t ill. Maybe he’s so thick that he just forgot to wake up” (?).

    The igloo, which was gifted by one of his beloved pilgrims, has been in the living room for a couple of months but he didn’t set paw in it throughout that time, no doubt because the weather was so mild. However, the Arctic blast brought by Storm Arwen was obviously too much to bear, and he has now retreated so deep inside that there’s no budging him. (Catorze is notoriously difficult to shift from his igloo once bedded in; if we need to get him out, for a vet visit or a pill, for instance, Cat Daddy has been known to pick up the entire igloo and shake it, like shaking vinegar over chips*. Catorze clings on for dear life and eventually exits the igloo with all the urgency of a very viscous, gloopy, screaming sauce.)

    *Non-Brits: ask your British friends.

    Cat Daddy and I are both quite happy that Catorze has rediscovered his igloo. As well as giving us some peace at night, it also keeps him out of mischief somewhat (Catorze, I mean, not Cat Daddy).

    Here is the little sod, enjoying his cosy bed:

    He’s in there somewhere.

  • Les yeux sur nous

    A few updates from us at Le Château:

    I am still alive. This is good news, although I still think death would have been kinder because I now have to live out my days knowing I have indirectly had cat arse in my mouth. And our holiday apartment hosts have emailed Cat Daddy to thank him for leaving the place clean and tidy, and have said he is welcome to return anytime. This is also good, if surprising, news.

    However, Deliveroo, having pocketed the £100 cost of the order that never came, have still not refunded Cat Daddy and have closed the case because he “failed to respond to their emails”. (He DID respond, multiple times.) This is not quite such good news.

    And, in even less optimal news, Louis Catorze has taken his food-driven creepy staring to another level. As well as staring from a distance, staring from close up, and the more passive-aggressive sitting by his bowl looking dejected, he has now begun to creepy-stare whilst we watch television in the dark.

    Now, having him stare in the dark may not sound that bad, since a black cat in a dark room is technically invisible. However, this is what we’re faced with:

    For heaven’s sake.

    I know. It’s just not on.

    I fear that the little sod may be channelling his big brother Luther, who practically INVENTED food-driven bullying and intimidation. If his pleas for food were ignored and his creepy staring didn’t work, he would take to sliding objects off the table, with his eyes fixed unblinkingly upon mine. If that didn’t work, he would jump up on top of the television and dangle one limb down over the screen, then another limb, then his tail. And if THAT didn’t work, he would pad about on top of the television and find the power button to switch it off.

    This chap would be proud of his little brother for following in his foodsteps.

    Because Catorze is considerably less bright than Luther, it has taken him seven years to get to this point. But the fact that he’s got this far is alarming (our expectations were pretty low).

    I know that the only solution is not to look at him. But, just like those people who can’t tear their eyes away from a horrible car accident whilst passing, we can’t help it.

  • Un fromage gras nourrit bien des vers

    I am very upset, because I have consumed food from a plate that was licked by Louis Catorze. And, yes, I am fully aware that cats lick their arses. That’s why I am upset.

    Ordinarily I would die a thousand deaths before anything licked by a cat touched my mouth. But, on this occasion, I just … FORGOT. I know. It’s embarrassing and pathetic.

    I had settled down in the living room with a plate of Woodlands Melbury ewe’s milk cheese, and Catorze was on my lap. After I had finished the cheese, very unusually the little sod went to my plate and licked it from one side to the other, cleaning it of every microscopic crumb. Yes, I know that I only posted a few days ago to say that he didn’t really like cheese other than organic aged Comté. Now, it seems that either he has changed his mind, or the weird space-time fabric warp that took place last Friday is still in effect.

    Anyway, after finishing my cheese, I wanted something sweet but couldn’t fetch it myself because I was trapped under Catorze, so I texted Cat Daddy and asked him to bring me some coconut. He brought me a big chunk on a chopping board, with a knife, and obviously I should have cut it up on the chopping board and eaten the bits from there. But I didn’t. I put the bits on the plate, and I only remembered the painful truth about the plate when I had eaten all the pieces but one.

    Naturellement I have Googled “Will eating cat saliva kill me?” and it seems that it’s only life-threatening if it enters the blood stream, but the idea of it is so gut-wrenchingly vile that I would actually rather choose death. But I want a quick death. I don’t want the slow one that would come from worms eating me from my mouth downwards. (I am convinced that I can feel cat arse tapeworms slithering around in my mouth, in the same way that, if you talk at length about ants or fleas, eventually you’re sure that your skin is alive with them.)

    So here I am, waiting to die. And Catorze is by my side, urging me to hurry up so that he can have Cat Daddy all to himself.

    “Merde, she’s still alive.”

  • La piqûre royale

    We have had a right old rigmarole this year with Louis Catorze’s booster vaccination.

    He was due to have it in September but, because he needed an antibiotic shot after his dental surgery, he couldn’t have the booster in the same appointment, as planned. Then supplies of the vaccine ran out, with replenishments not due until early December.

    To complicate things further, because Catorze also needs a steroid shot which can’t be administered alongside the booster, the out-of-stock problem royally messed with the timings. In short, to guarantee him a timely booster in December, we’ve been having to choose between giving him steroid shots when he didn’t need them, or NOT giving him steroid shots when he DID need them. Naturellement we opted for the former.

    We were due to take him for a not-urgently-needed steroid shot on Monday, when he decided to go completely psycho an hour before the appointment.

    He was racing around, attacking invisible prey and leaping in and out of Blue the Smoke Bengal’s mamma’s Thank You For Cat-Sitting gift bag. Somehow he managed to loosen the lid on one of the jars in the bag, leaking fruit jelly everywhere, so I had to wipe down the containers and give them away bagless. (Catorze kept the bag as a play yurt, jelly residue and all.)

    More worryingly, he was also chasing his tail. Although he was doing it playfully, and not in the steady, trance-like way that he did when he had Feline Hyperesthesia*, I didn’t want him reminding himself of how much fun it is to chew his tail. So I had to unleash the toy that I’d bought him for Yule, to take his mind off his tail and to wear him out a little.

    *If you have the time and the inclination, have a look through the blog entries from December 2016 to February-ish 2017, for the full horror of this. Feline Hyperesthesia is a horrible condition like no other I’ve ever seen, and for most cats it means medication for life. Catorze, being the oddity that he is, is the only cat I’ve known to recover from it and to no longer require medication. (Obviously he still needs it for the other 7,052 things that are wrong with him, but not for Feline Hyperesthesia.)

    During the short journey to the vet, and upon arrival there, an utterly unworn-out Catorze screamed his guts out, so much so that a massive Dulux dog in the waiting room barked at him to shut up. (He didn’t.) I wasn’t looking forward to giving an already-manic cat an injection that would make him worse, but then our vet delivered the joyous news that the vaccine had come in early.

    Merci. À. Dieu.

    So we swapped treatments, and Catorze had his booster instead of his steroid shot.

    We are most relieved that little sod is no longer running around like a gun-toting, placard-bearing anti-vaxxer. (You’ve seen the trouble he causes WITHOUT a gun and a placard, so can you imagine him WITH them?) And, with his steroid shot not due for another week or two, perhaps we can look forward to a brief peaceful interlude before his madness starts again.

    What would it say on his placard? All suggestions welcome.

  • 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.”