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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.

  • Les oignons font pleurer

    Merci à Dieu: it’s half term. And what better way to round off the last week at school than with the second attempt at the French speaking tests that I’d had to discard the first time around because Louis Catorze did not respect the test conditions.

    This time it was the kids who stuffed up the task for various reasons, so I ended up having to ditch these, too, and mark the previous test pieces containing the Catorze screaming as they were actually better. As I was playing them back, Catorze strolled in and meowed every time he heard his voice on the recording. YES, HE WAS REPLYING TO HIS OWN SCREAMS.

    In other news, someone has been digging up Cat Daddy’s onion plants, and he’s not too happy about it. Unrepeatable Expletives of the Worst Kind have been used, multiple times.

    Can you guess the identity of the number one suspect? I’ll give you a bit of time to think about it, as this is quite a tricky one.

    Me: “Maybe it wasn’t him.” (I know, I know. As soon as the words were out of my mouth I knew how stupid this sounded.)

    Cat Daddy: “Go and look at the hole.”

    It was too small to have been the work of the foxes, and too neat to have been the squirrels.

    Cat Daddy: “And before you blame the foxes or the squirrels, can you explain how they might have also dug up the chard that I was propagating INDOORS? Did they sneak in, dig around and then sneak out completely unnoticed?”

    Oh dear.

    Anyway, Catorze is the picture of innocence and says we can’t prove anything. What is your verdict?

    “It wasn’t moi.”

  • Neutre, comme La Suisse

    When it snows in the U.K. – which is nowhere near as often as non-Brits would imagine – most people swear firm allegiance to either Team Youpi! or Team Non.

    I am very much Team Youpi! I love it. I appreciate that it’s not much fun when you have to actually go out and do things, but I would rather do battle than have no snow at all.

    Cat Daddy is Team Non. This stems from when he used to run his own business and the snow meant severe disruption to their deliveries. One December, when Royal Mail couldn’t cope, he actually put a customer’s parcel in the car and personally delivered it so that they would have it in time for Christmas, just like a latter-day Santa.

    Also, many years ago, I made Cat Daddy take me to the cinema during a yellow – or possibly amber? – weather warning, and I remember him muttering Unrepeatable Expletives of the Worst Kind as he flung a blanket, a spade and bottled water into the car for our journey. Yes, I made him drive to the cinema with me, in the snow, to see a film he didn’t even want to see and which was the sequel whose original he also hadn’t wanted to see. And, no, it wasn’t even a good sequel. They never are.

    Now, you’d imagine Louis Catorze would side with his daddy, just to make me feel outnumbered and spited, but in actual fact he is neutral. Whilst he doesn’t spend extra time outside because of the snow, nor is he one of those cats who puts one paw onto it and then aborts their mission. He just goes about his normal life – whatever “normal” may be – in exactly the same way that he would if there were no snow.

    Yes, a cat who is neutral to snow. It’s not normal. Trust me, I know. But I guess this is just another of the many [insert appropriate noun here because I can’t think of one] that make him so [insert appropriate adjective here because I can’t think of one].

    Here is the little sod, entranced by a recent snowfall:

    “Il neige!”

    Then Cat Daddy opened the window wider and lifted him up so that he could get a better look:

    The Pest from the West (of London).

  • Au bord de la rivière

    On Saturday, Cat Daddy and I watched our beloved Brentford play Middlesbrough away.

    Louis Catorze always sits on his daddy’s lap during football matches (no great surprise there). However, Cat Daddy tends to become very animated and over-excited, and Sa Maj doesn’t approve of this. In fact, he doesn’t even approve of mild animation and excitement. Cat Daddy has to be a statue, and anything else is unacceptable.

    This was the sequence of events during the match:

    1. Middlesbrough goal just a couple of minutes in. Unrepeatable expletives from Cat Daddy, moderate fidgeting from Catorze.

    2. Brentford goal. Cat Daddy shouts “Yesssss!” sending Catorze springing off his lap and darting into a corner, meowing disdainfully.

    3. Catorze returns but to my lap this time, not quite trusting Cat Daddy after his outburst. However, this only lasts about 0.3 seconds and he’s soon back in his happy place.

    4. Start of second half. Spirited conversation from Cat Daddy. Catorze doesn’t like this and twitches and squirms, all the while glaring contemptuously at his papa.

    5. Second Brentford goal. Cat Daddy says “Yes!” in a deliberately muted fashion. Catorze is off again, meowing disdainfully.

    6. Cat Daddy: “[Unrepeatable expletives.] I was really careful that time!”

    7. Catorze returns, whining like a dog. Cat Daddy picks him up and roughs him up a little, berating him for being such a complainer. In actual fact his complaining voice and his normal voice sound exactly the same.

    8. Middlesbrough defender slips on the wet turf – ironic since the home commentators had earlier suggested that we southern wimps wouldn’t be able to cope with the inclement northern weather conditions – resulting in a third Brentford goal. Cat Daddy can’t be bothered to restrain himself on this occasion and goes all out with the cheering. At this point Catorze has had enough and leaves the room, remaining absent for the fourth Brentford goal and the full-time whistle.

    9. Catorze returns – freezing cold and damp – in time for Cat Daddy’s post-match FaceTime call with Cocoa the babysit cat’s daddy, clearly unable to resist the allure of another male voice. And, when Cat Daddy says goodbye, he takes Catorze’s tail in his fingers and waves it at the camera.

    I have always been mildly offended that Catorze never chooses my lap during football. However, if the price to pay is not being allowed to even speak, I think I’m happy to leave the boys to it.

    Hoping The Bees don’t score anytime soon. Or ever.

  • Gratter, c’est gagner

    Cat Daddy and I started Dry February this month, so now we can’t turn to alcohol if Catorze’s behaviour drives us to despair. Or perhaps I should say WHEN, not IF: he ruined my online staff meeting on Wednesday by headbutting my laptop and screaming, and on Thursday he slept all morning, went outside at lunchtime but was back at 15:00 on the dot to annoy my Year 11s. YES, THAT SAME CLASS AGAIN.

    Luckily he wore himself out and had nothing left to give for online parents’ evening, which is just as well because I really didn’t want THAT turning to merde too. However, instead, the obligatory embarrassment took the form of a scantily-clad lingerie model, who randomly appeared on a pop-up ad when I was sharing my screen with a student and his mum.

    Sadly Catorze has started scratching again. He is very sneaky about it and usually does it when we’re not around so, short of ensuring that he is permanently escorted around the premises like a dangerous maximum security inmate, we don’t really stand much chance of stopping him. In the event that we catch him at it – last week I caught him scratching on the tips of my knitting needles which were sticking out of the bag – we can take measures to stop him from accessing that particular thing, but then he just goes and finds new things. Anything with a pointy end or a corner will do.

    The other day, the little sod rubbed his face against the corners of Cat Daddy’s vinyl records (younger followers: ask your parents), so I covered the rack with a blanket, being sure to properly tuck in the edges to stop Le Roi from shimmying underneath.

    The next day the blanket was in complete disarray, and the irresistible sharp corners of the records were exposed. I was shocked but not surprised.

    Cat Daddy took this picture last week of Catorze’s face. Luckily the light makes it look worse than it is, plus it has since improved so there’s no need to feel too sorry for him (especially as he caused it), but Cat Daddy is still threatening to deploy Le Cône “as a circuit-breaker”. Let’s hope that we won’t have to go there, and that the increased dose of two steroid pills a day will suffice.

    Silly boy.

  • Je suis mon pire ennemi en personne (Partie 2)

    Louis Catorze’s El Día de los Muertos cold-weather igloo comes out in autumn and remains in place until May. The little sod is always delighted and refuses to be removed from it during daylight hours. However, in late January, he suddenly stopped sleeping in it.

    At first we didn’t think much of it but then we felt bad that we hadn’t checked for something nasty in the igloo (massive pile of puke, dead rat, mummified human body part plundered from some ancient burial ground, that kind of thing).

    I peered into the igloo upon returning home after a walk to discover … a huge clump of cat hair. Oui, Mesdames et Messieurs: Catorze’s OWN DISGUSTO-FUR has repulsed him enough to propel him out of his favourite place and send him searching for alternative sleeping spots.

    Anyway, the igloo has been cleaned, la personne royale has been brushed and normal service has resumed. As you were.

    Zoom in for the tiniest glimpse of fang.

  • Rester en bonne santé

    The week before last, after around five days of being clean, Louis Catorze started scratching again and his inner eye corners began to swell, JUST like this time last year. This time we didn’t hang around so, as of last Monday, he is back on one steroid pill a day, and this means that the day-long psycho screamathons have restarted.

    This is completely the opposite of what is supposed to happen (see below), but that’s Catorze all over:

    Nope. (Taken from Trudell Animal Health.)

    Cat Daddy, shouting to be heard over the screams: “I don’t know what’s wrong with him. He’s gone bloody demented.”

    Because we don’t know what triggers his allergy and are highly unlikely to find out, all we can do for the moment is keep pilling him and blasting him with the beeswax candles, wear earplugs and hope for the best.

    Over the last six years we have changed our minds about 9,052 times about what could be causing his problems. For a while we were convinced that it was some sort of household item, because Catorze’s worst ever episode* in January 2014 took place when he was an indoor cat, before he came to live with us.

    *I had since referred to last year as his worst ever episode but, having compared photos, I can now confirm that January 2014 was, in fact, worse. The length of time in Le Cône may have made last year seem worse than it was yet, with hindsight, I think this may have saved him.

    However, last year he was – and remains – an outdoor cat, and his eyes seem to look the weepiest when he’s just come in from outdoors, indicating that something outside is irritating him. We have noticed this on numerous occasions during the last few months, which is most bizarre considering it’s the time that most plants are asleep. Unless, of course, he’s allergic to soil. Or water. Or perhaps, several years on from when he was originally left behind by a UFO, his body is finally starting to reject our air, and what he really needs in order to thrive are the atmospheric conditions of his home planet, wherever that may be.

    Please keep your fingers crossed that we can hold it off and stop it from turning nasty.

  • Hurler à la lune

    On Thursday Cat Daddy had to pop to Chiswick at around 2:45pm, which meant that Louis Catorze was, tragically, without male company for 90 whole minutes.

    Obviously waiting for Cat Daddy to return was too much to ask so, instead, he decided to seek out boys from elsewhere. And, regretfully, the only ones available happened to be the Year 11 students in my online lesson – yes, THE SAME GROUP who’d had to endure the tail shenanigans a couple of weeks ago, whilst studying the joys of the imperfect tense: https://louiscatorze.com/2021/01/14/limparfait/

    The combination of irresistible male voices plus steroids (yes, he’s back on them: more about that next time) plus a full moon meant that Catorze was absolutely feral, clambering across the laptop and screaming himself senseless.

    Him: “Mwahhhh!”

    Me: “Be quiet!”

    Him: “MWAHHHHHHH!”

    Me: “Oh, for God’s sake, shush!”

    [Lots of giggles]

    Kid: “Aw, Miss! Don’t bully your cat!”

    Merde. Not only had I forgotten to press the mute button, but the little sod had managed to convince my class that he was somehow the victim in all this.

    Not long afterwards, the same kid casually informed me, “Miss, the other cats have started now.”

    Me: “What do you mean? What other cats? Started what? I thought you only had one cat?”

    Him: “No, not my cat. The ones he hangs out with. They’re kind of like a gang.”

    Oh my.

    I couldn’t hear any other cats, but the kid appeared to be telling me that random neighbourhood ones had started to gather and/or respond. So either Catorze’s screaming had drifted through the open window, compelling his comrades to come to his aid, or the cats had detected the general full moon madness and had picked that very moment to have some fun. Or maybe it was both. Anyway, given the choice of doing any work or laughing hysterically at the double cat cacophony, the kid chose the latter. And his classmates soon followed suit.

    The phrase “You couldn’t make this shit up” was INVENTED for me/this household/cats/Catorze. Here he is, psyching himself up for more of the same:

    “Où sont les garçons?”

  • L’horloge hantée

    Louis Catorze is absolutely MANIC at the moment. He sleeps from late morning to late afternoon and is in full-on play mode after that, thundering around the house and being a nuisance. I now have to make sure my knitting bag is fully zipped to the end, because Cat Daddy has caught him jumping into the open bag and thrashing around, tipping my darning needles all over the place. And his uninvited appearances at my online lessons have now become more regular; yesterday was another day of students screaming, “Miss, I can see his tail! Miiiiiiiiss! MIIIIIIIIISSSS!”

    It’s a full moon tonight, which partly explains it. But I also suspect that Catorze might be communing with and/or summoning evil entities from somewhere, which isn’t ideal.

    In other, possibly related news, the Lumie Bodyclock saga continues, and I have discovered that the way to get it working is to turn the sound off. Yes, I know, this is exactly the opposite of what should happen, but nevertheless it’s what DOES happen: when the display says “Audio off” and there is an image of a musical note with a line through it, this indicates that both the alarm and the light function ARE ON and will work exactly as they should in the morning.

    I have also discovered that, during the few minutes just before the alarm goes off, there is some sort of sound inaudible to human ears. I don’t know what it is (obviously, on account of it being inaudible) but Le Roi has detected it, in the same way that cats’ hypersensitivity picks up on all manner of things indiscernible to us. You know that moment when your cat stops what they’re doing and stares, wide-eyed, at a blank patch of wall behind you? It’s the audio version of that.

    Here he is listening intently to it, whatever “it” may be, and confirming my view that cats are creepy as hell. What he can hear is most likely the tropical birds on a much lower volume. But, equally, it could be demons or poltergeists.

    “Is anybody there? Chirp once for OUI.”

  • Les poils sales

    Louis Catorze has had some sort of vile crud stuck on his tail for a number of days now. We have no idea what it is, but we have established that it’s not excrement of any kind: not his (which would be bad) and not that of any other animal (which would be very, very bad indeed).

    Now, I imagine you’re wondering why on earth the crud has been there for such a long time, and this is a fair question. Believe me, this is not what we want. But the little bastard refuses to clean it off – in fact, he’s so thick that he may not even know it’s there – nor will he allow us to clean it off. I’ve tried, and it didn’t go well. One of his many terrifying superpowers is his ability to summon the strength of ten angry bears if he is made to do anything he doesn’t want to do … and, in the unlikely event of us managing to pin down this freakishly strong hell-beast, his tail then develops a wild, thrashing life of its own, making cleaning impossible.

    So we have had to live with it, trying not to think too hard about the fact that the little sod is probably dispersing invisible granules of micro-crud wherever he goes. And, every so often, when we stroke him, he gives us a little reminder of this horror by flicking his tail upwards and making the crud touch our skin. Nothing – I repeat, NOTHING – is as revolting as the feeling of this.

    Here he is, taunting us with the sight of the crud and knowing full well that we will never get to it:

    “Clean moi if you can.” (We can’t.)

  • On a dépassé cinq cents!

    Sainte Marie, Mère de Dieu: Sa Maj has reached the incredible number of five hundred – yes, FIVE HUNDRED – followers. This is quite something given that, when I began Le Blog all those years ago, I thought perhaps my mum and about a dozen friends might read it (and that most of them would get bored after a week or two).

    Back then, the original aim was to reach out to other humans with allergic cats, in the hope of finding someone who had a cat like Louis Catorze and perhaps even finding a cure for his allergy. I never did find that cure, and I certainly didn’t find another cat like Catorze (which is probably just as well), but Le Blog has introduced me to lovely people from all over the world, and their wonderful furry overlords.

    I have lost the odd follower along the way, most notably the group of bodybuilders who started following when I added the key word “steroids” to my tags. Unsurprisingly, when they came to realise that this was actually a blog about a silly black cat and not about performance-enhancing substances, one by one they fell away. I can’t say I’m surprised, as Catorze has that sort of effect on people. But how delightful that the hardcore among you have hung on in there. If you’re still here, MERCI BEAUCOUP, especially if you have been around since the beginning.

    Here is the very first photo of Catorze, taken in his foster mamma’s garden on the day we brought him home in July 2014:

    A bit rough around the edges.

    And here he is now (taken yesterday):

    Not really any improvement, but tant pis.

  • Le chat aux yeux kaléidoscopiques

    I recently found out that Louis Catorze’s appetite-enhancing pill (Mirtazapine, of which he had one dose in late December) is also used as an anti-depressant. A friend told me that she was prescribed this drug as in her younger days and “lost six months of her life”.

    As you are well aware, an anti-depressant is absolutely the last thing in this world that Catorze needs. No wonder he went off the rails and turned into an eating, screaming maniac. What a good thing we only gave him one dose and not two.

    Anyway, I have hidden the remaining Mirtazapine just in case Cat Daddy is tempted to give it to Sa Maj just for a laugh. Although, the way online teaching is going, I think I may well need it more than Catorze.

    It’s for medicinal reasons, Officer.

  • À cheval donné on ne regarde pas les dents

    Blue the Smoke Bengal gave Louis Catorze a Christmas gift, which was very generous of him given that Catorze hasn’t done the slightest thing to deserve it and, in fact, has been quite rude and unpleasant to him. This must be what it feels like when your kid is the awful one whom all the other kids hate, but their parents still go out of their way to be nice because they feel sorry for you.

    If some other cat were mean to Catorze I’m not sure I’d be bothered to give him/her a gift, and I’d probably judge the human for their poor parenting skills, but good for Blue’s mamma for being the bigger person here.

    The Trojan horse.

    Anyway, the gift was a set of ELEVEN jingle bell cat toys, and they are the noisiest things I have ever heard. Catorze loves them, with his preferred playtimes appearing to be the times that are the least convenient for us: during tense football matches or television dramas, that kind of thing. In the middle of the night would, I imagine, also be an excellent time, were it not for that fact that we do an inventory of the balls before we go to bed at night, just like in prison kitchens where they count in the knives at the end of every shift.

    Bien joué, Blue’s mamma. Bien joué.

    Here are a few of the offending items. Even the soft ones have bells in them.

  • Qui n’a pas de mémoire doit avoir des jambes

    Louis Catorze is now on the lowest dose of one steroid pill every other day. And it’s just as well it’s only every other day, because the little sod has now decided he won’t eat his Pill Pockets anymore. So every pill has to be a Greco job.

    There have been one or two Drunk-Grecos. The less said about these, the better.

    Anyway, health-wise he is doing very well indeed. His skin and fur are much improved.

    Cat Daddy: “Yeah, until you get close up. It’s like when you see a girl from afar in a dimly lit club, but then when you approach …” [Rest of comment is too offensive to repeat.]

    Catorze’s knee, however, isn’t so great. I had started keeping a diary of occasions when his knee caved in, hoping that it would prove useful in the future should the vet need to know, but then I came to realise that there is no pattern whatsoever. And, the last time I updated the diary, Cat Daddy looked over my shoulder and said, “Oh, is that what you’re doing? His knee has gone loads more times than that, but I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know you were recording it.”

    And that was the end of my record-keeping.

    These days, when Catorze’s knee goes, it’s nowhere near as distressing for him as that first weekend when he collapsed on top of me at 5am, hissing and whining. He is getting used to it, and sometimes he surprises us by how darned fast he is on three legs. On one occasion I took hold of his leg and gently stretched it backwards and after a soft click, it was fine again. But, annoyingly, whatever I did then seems to have been a lucky one-off, for I haven’t succeeded since.

    I have been trying to teach him to lie down when his knee goes. And, despite being so dense that light bends around him, he is learning and starting to do it of his own accord. He insists on choosing the least helpful places to lie down, but we’ll get to that next. The main thing is he’s beginning to understand that lying down beats hobbling around, whining and suffering.

    Here he is, demonstrating one of his highly unhelpful places:

    Yes, he WAS the one who pulled out those stringy bits from the carpet. Who else would it be?

  • L’imparfait

    So … cats ruining video calls. Always hilarious when it happens to someone else and you’re just observing. Distinctly less funny when it’s your cat, and you’re the one responsible for maintaining any vague semblance of order.

    It’s not normal to have 863 examples of such behaviour, unless you have 863 cats. One cat is not meant to cause this much bother. However, this is Louis Catorze we’re talking about, so I don’t imagine anyone is surprised.

    Anyway … Year 11 can be a troublesome bunch, and the graveyard shift with them (last lesson of the day, 15:00 to 16:00) is always a tough gig. It’s been particularly bad since they were told that their exams have been cancelled, yet minimal guidance has been given about exactly what will happen instead. They have taken this to mean it’s party time. Unfortunately I don’t share this view.

    During one especially trying lesson last week (the imperfect tense: everyone’s favourite thing), Catorze decided to come and sit on my stomach and chest. Now, we all know that he wants me dead, and that he only has another 8 days to do the deed and have it register as a Covid death, so there is no reason for him to sit on me other than to spite me, or perhaps in the hope that I will suffocate and die. However, due to the unfortunate camera angle and the shadow falling across my body, he wasn’t fully visible to the students on my video lesson. So all they could see was his sticking-up tail sailing past the camera.

    This was how the tragic sequence of events unfolded that day:

    1. Poker-straight vertical tail sails past, left to right. Students say nothing.

    2. Tail sails past, right to left. Students’ eyes are suddenly fixed to the screen, concentrating yet also confused.

    3. Tail sails past again, left to right. Now everyone is paying attention.

    4. Kid 1: “Miss …?”

    5. Kid 2: “Yeah, Miss. What the …?”

    6. Catorze settles on my lap/chest and now everyone can see his head. He has only ever sat in this position twice in his whole life, once last year and once in 2014. (The fact that I can remember when is indicative of its rarity.)

    7. Me: “Erm, ok, so it seems we’ve got company. Alors, continuons…”

    8. Kids start giggling.

    9. Cat Daddy looks in (with the kids safely out of sight, bien sûr), sees Catorze on me and guesses from my French conversation that I am mid-lesson. He mouths the words “PUSH HIM OFF!” making appropriate gestures at the same time to be extra helpful.

    10. It then dawns on me that he thinks I placed Catorze there on purpose. Oh. Mon. Dieu.

    11. Kids giggle some more as I attempt to bluster on. No work whatsoever is done.

    12. The end.

    The bad news is that we have another five weeks of this until half term, and the kids have learned absolutely sod all French so far. The good news is … well … I’ll get back to you as soon as we have any.

    Je me reposais, tu te reposais, il/elle se reposait …