How do you plan your goals?
Louis Catorze’s single goal in life is to annoy us as much as possible, and this comes naturally to him. It requires absolutely zero effort.
However, he is very flattered that his work comes across as planned.
For more Catorzian capers, please visit http://louiscatorze.com
One of the things that I dislike about Catorzian Summer Time is that we see much less of Louis Catorze.
One of the best parts of my morning routine was drinking green tea with Catorze on my lap. However, in the summer, I only ever see him briefly for breakfast and then he’s out. Sometimes I don’t see him in the morning at all, nor do I even know where he is until he rolls in from wherever, at whatever time.
Naturellement, this considerably narrows my window for administering Catorze’s thyroid medication. If I’m not ready to carpe diem, the opportunity is lost – unless I fancy scrabbling around in the undergrowth at The Back (nope) or scaling the fence into the Zone Libre (HELL, nope) to catch him.
If Catorze is on my bed when I wake up in the morning, I have to race to beat him downstairs so that I can apply the gel to one finger of the glove before he sees it. Sometimes, instead of coming down, he sticks his head through the balustrade and silently watches me, so I have to be very careful that I’m not seen messing with any of his thyroid paraphernalia, believing him to still be on the bed.
One huge blessing, however, is that Catorze is starting to writhe and kick less than he did when we first began this treatment. Is this a sign that he could actually – gasp – be getting used to it? Dare I hope that, one day, he will just sit still and accept it?
For more Catorzian capers, please visit http://louiscatorze.com
My sister and her kids came to stay last week, as you know, having seen the creative writing cat posts from Wednesday and Thursday. Cat Daddy and I don’t share a bedroom on account of his snoring so, when we have more than two overnight guests, one of us often sleeps on the sofa so that the other can have a restful night.
Unfortunately Louis Catorze becomes very excitable and over-stimulated at anything which disrupts his routine, such as, erm, a person sleeping in a place where they don’t usually sleep.
You can see where this is going, can’t you?
On the first night, I took the sofa. During CST, Catorze usually shows no interest whatsoever in sleeping next to me. However, on this occasion, because the location was something new and unusual, he was all over me, bouncing around, screaming and generally being a pain in the arse.
As a result, I had a predictably shocking night’s sleep.
Cat Daddy: “You should have shut him out of the room.”
Me: “He’d only have screamed for the door to be opened.”
Him: “He’d have got bored eventually.”
Whatever.
For the next few nights, Cat Daddy took the sofa. At first he kept the door open and suffered the same fate of being used as a trampoline. Then, on the last night, he closed the door, bizarrely believing that he had outfoxed Catorze despite my warnings. I felt like the old man in horror films who tells the reckless teenagers not to go poking around in the haunted woods. So many more teenagers would still be alive if they’d only listened to the old man.
Catorze sat outside the closed door, whining, for hours. And hours. AND HOURS. It wasn’t even his usual whine, which is bad enough, but a new, extra-guttural werewolf sound that I have never heard before, clearly invented just for that night. It was excruciating. I called to him a couple of times and, each time, he came. But, after a few half-hearted bounces and murmurs, he returned downstairs to resume his wounded werewolf sounds.
Cat Daddy went to the bathroom at 4:30am, having inexplicably heard none of the whining (?). Naturellement, once the door was opened, Catorze then decided that he no longer wanted to go into the room and, instead, went outside to gad about with the other creatures of the night.
Cat Daddy later told me that he fed Catorze before going to the bathroom, so now the little sod is going to expect an extra meal at 4:30am. Oh God. All my years of ridiculing people who get up at stupid times to feed their cats, have just crumbled into smoking ash in front of my eyes.
Absolute bastard cat.
For more Catorzian capers, please visit http://louiscatorze.com
Based on true events
A story by Louis Catorze’s human cousin Eva, aged 9
*WARNING: CONTAINS GRAPHIC REFERENCES TO MURDER.*
DAY 1
Hour 1: silence. The cats still aren’t home. I honestly can’t believe my life is to sit and sit, alerting motion, and how much do I get paid? Nothing. Not a fart. Now I’ll wait until motion.
Hour 2: nothing.
Hour 3: now I can year snuffling, and – OH GOODNESS. Those felines are playing with something! Phew. My cables are still in.
DAY 2
I haven’t been writing lately. After what I saw yesterday I’ve been in recovery. Don’t even ask me what happened.
Wow! You have a way of getting things out of me.
At around midnight I saw – and heard – Roux (the white feline with the rather big behind) eating something. But I woke up, ready to have another boring day, when I saw it. One single gut. At first I thought it was some jam that one of their careless human slaves had dropped on my floor. But no. A single, bloody gut. The victim of one of the felines.
So I alerted the giant and he came straight away, beaming with pride, but no! I don’t even get any credit. It’s all: “Oohh, I came down the stairs and I found this gut”. Honestly, they might as well be saying “This camera is a waste of money and space”.
Wait – am I a waste of money and space?
About the author: Eva lives on the south coast with her parents, her little sister, and cats Otis and Roux. Eva likes books and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and her favourite school subjects are Reading for Pleasure and English.
For more Catorzian capers, please visit http://louiscatorze.com
Based on true events
A story by Louis Catorze’s human cousin Azalea, aged 7
One day, a cow-cat called Roux had an idea, an amazing idea indeed. But first she had a sad sleep in a lonely box, waiting for her cubs to come back.
She slept through the night, and when she awoke: “THUD!” Waiting all day, baking in the sun, and then she heard it again.
Feeding time!
“Yum yum yum!” She came down the stairs, then waited some more, and then she munched up her food with a bit of a yawn. But when she started to leave, she saw AN OPEN CUPBOARD! DREAMIES GALORE!
When she pushed and she pulled, there it was. Something better than anything else. She clawed and she bit, and opened up the pack. But soon it all came back up: “Blech!”
She was halfway through the second bag but then someone stopped it all. A big, cat-feasting giant: HER DAD.
About the author: Azalea lives on the south coast with her parents, her big sister, and cats Otis and Roux. Azalea likes baking and gardening, and her favourite school subject is English.
For more Catorzian capers, please visit http://louiscatorze.com
My Oura fitness tracker gives me a calorie burn target every day, based on the quality of sleep that it thinks I’ve had. And, a few days ago, I returned from a walk around the park, believing I had met my target but in fact I was twenty calories short.
I decided to walk up and down the garden to try to meet my target. And, naturellement, Louis Catorze decided to crawl out from wherever in the undergrowth he was hiding, and started screaming. I walked up and down a couple of times, only to have him follow me, screaming all the way.
In my sheer desperation to shut him up, I picked him up. But, since I still hadn’t reached my target, I had no option but to continue walking up and down the garden, holding him.
Words cannot describe how much I did not want my neighbours to see me, pacing up and down the garden, holding a cat as if calming a fractious baby (which, in a way, I was). But I did it. And at least it stopped the screaming, which would have compelled them to look out of the window and see that it WASN’T “some other black cat” (which is what I always say when anything untoward happens).
After logging those extra few minutes of walking, I finally received the glorious, long-awaited words from Oura congratulating me for attaining my goal. I suppose it should have been “weighted walking”, rather than just plain “walking”, but then Catorze’s gossamer-light 2.87kg form would have had no more impact on my walk than, say, adding a light scarf or a hat.
Here he is, saying, “That’s enough exercise; it’s time for a lie-down.” For once he’s making sense:
For more Catorzian capers, please visit http://louiscatorze.com
Although I am very lucky to be able to go to such beautiful places on holiday, I really enjoy being back home.
One thing I am not enjoying, however, is having to administer Louis Catorze’s thyroid medication. Two weeks away from it has made me forget just how non-fun it is.
That said, it’s interesting (well, not “interesting” by most people’s standards, just for those of us who have to administer meds to bastard cats) how our methods evolve, and how we adapt to make a really shit process perhaps 0.01% less shit.
I do the morning application by myself, before I go to work. This involves applying a drop of medication to the finger of a glove, then Acting Normal until I am able to pounce on the little sod. Very often, I just pick up the glove and wipe the gel onto his ear. I don’t bother to put the glove fully on as it would be utterly impossible to do this with one hand, whilst restraining a screaming, writhing bastard cat in the other.
However, the evening session is a two-man job; Cat Daddy holds Catorze and has what he calls “one of their man-to-man chats”, and that buys me some time to actually put on the glove and do it properly.
The most recent chat went something like this:
Cat Daddy: “Louis-boy! Your fur is feeling nice and soft, isn’t it? Have you been out in the rain? Are you enjoying the summer? Lots of birds and bugs to see out there.”
Catorze, hanging limply in his papa’s arms and listening intently: “Mwah.”
Sometimes, if I’m taking too long to fetch all the medication paraphernalia, Cat Daddy will tell me to hurry up, but he says it in his Cat Daddy voice to avoid alerting Catorze.
Between us, with Cat Daddy providing the diversion and me doing the actual deed, we get the job done.
I know that there are people out there who have to deal with worse. But I still hate this.
For more Catorzian capers, please visit http://louiscatorze.com
Have you heard that saying: “You’re only ever one mouse click away from cats and their bullshittery”?
Meet Pumpkin:
In a truly exploitative fashion that only a cat could get away with, Pumpkin conned her way into someone’s house (including a break-and-enter through an upper floor window at 3am, scaring the merde out of the resident) and refused to leave. Unfortunately the bloke who hosted her wasn’t able to keep her due to family members being allergic to cats so, after being scanned and confirmed chipless, Pumpkin moved in permanently with Antoine (Louis Catorze’s frère-from-another-mère) and Boots (Antoine’s usurper stepbrother).
Pumpkin had only been in her new abode for a few hours when she disappeared. Her mamma found no trace of her, although she did find … an open bathroom window. Nobody had actually seen Pumpkin leave but, having searched the house, the humans came to the most logical conclusion: that the little sod had done a runner.
Where on earth does one start when looking for a cat who isn’t yet chipped (the vet appointment had been booked for three days later), and who knows neither her house nor her own name?
That evening, both Pumpkin’s mamma and I looked at maps and messaged one another about where she could have gone, and how easy it might be for anyone to find her. The surrounding area included a cemetery, which wouldn’t have been the most fun place to trawl at night, not even with the hilarity of shaking a bag of Dreamies and pointlessly calling out, “Pumpkin!”
One of the traditional strategies in this sort of situation is to place the humans’ dirty clothes in areas surrounding the house, in the hope that the smell of home might lure back the absconded kitty, but of course Pumpkin hadn’t been in her house for long enough to know that smell. My single, desperate idea, if she still hadn’t been found the next day, was to ask Cat-Hosting Bloke to give us some of his worn clothes – ridiculous, I know, since Pumpkin hadn’t been in his house for long, either – but it was all we had.
The following morning, Pumpkin’s mamma found a trail of cat food pouches strewn across the house, each punctured, with the contents drained. This isn’t Antoine’s style, and Boots, whilst food-orientated, is far too lazy to bother with this kind of caper, so the resident cats were swiftly ruled out. Either there was some sort of chupacabra at large … or Pumpkin was still in the house.
The little sod was finally found under the coffee table. And thank goodness for that, because I was ready to drive to the home of Cat-Hosting Bloke, bang on the door and shout, “Hey, you don’t know me, but I need you to take off your clothes and give them to me.”
Anyway, the moral of this story is that, unless you see the cat escaping, you should assume them to still be on the premises, and keep all perimeters closely guarded. The naughty miscreant is now under room arrest and won’t be going anywhere for the foreseeable future, apart from to attend that vet appointment which didn’t quite go as planned; Madame refused to be chipped and vaccinated despite four veterinary staff members’ best efforts.
How will the balance of power shift with Pumpkin’s arrival? Will Alpha Male Boots retain the crown, or will he be toppled by the young upstart?
For more Catorzian capers, please visit http://louiscatorze.com
How would you describe yourself to someone?
Louis Catorze would probably describe himself as a very fine cat indeed. However, we know that this is a lie.
It’s 17:05 on Sunday, and Cat Daddy and I returned home from our holiday almost an hour ago.
Louis Catorze was in his favourite place, atop the back of the outdoor sofa, when we arrived. He watched us through the patio doors as we unloaded our stuff, emitting the odd meow. Then, once we were all unpacked, the little sod decided to bugger off somewhere else.
We discovered that he had settled into the corner of the sofa, out of sight.
Just to clarify: he knew that we were home. He even made eye contact with each of us, on several occasions. But he made the conscious choice not to come and greet us.
At about 17:15, Cat Daddy opened the patio doors for some air (very reluctantly, because he didn’t want this to be interpreted as a sign of weakness). No reaction from Catorze.
I don’t know why I expected a cat who truly couldn’t give even the square root of a shit, to greet us like a loving, loyal dog.
We shall continue to sit here until someone blinks first.
Thank you to our lovely chat-sitter for looking after him. He obviously had such a lovely time with her that he couldn’t care less about us.
Updates:
17:30 – still not in.
18:00 – still not in.
18:15 – Cat Daddy really wants to go outside and see how his tomato plants are doing, but “doesn’t want to look like he’s giving in”. So he doesn’t.
18:33 – FINALLY!
For more Catorzian capers, please visit http://louiscatorze.com
What’s the story behind your nickname?
Anyone with the name “Butthole” surely has some explaining to do? Even more so, if this were a real name and not a nickname?
Now, please hear me out.
Cat Daddy and I are lucky enough to have a whisky distillery just a few minutes’ walk from our holiday let, so we stopped by on Wednesday. Unfortunately there was nobody around, but we were greeted by their very friendly front-of-house manager:
This was a most unusual-looking cat, with a tuxedo front half, tabby shadows on his body, and a tail locked in an anti-clockwise spiral position. That tail didn’t budge at all, nor did the cat utter a sound, except for purring when we stroked him.
A silent cat, to us, is like an alien being, and we don’t quite know what to do with ourselves when confronted with such a thing. Perhaps, when they were handing out vocal volume and tail straightness, God mistakenly omitted this one and gave Louis Catorze double helpings? That said, it’s highly unlikely that Catorze would accept anything God had to offer; he would probably be barging his way to the front of Satan’s queue instead.
We returned to the distillery yesterday, hoping to see the cat again. This time, we were greeted by both him (emitting one or two squeaks) AND his much more vocal sister.
Both came to live here as kittens, because the distillery owner wanted to control the rodent population without using horrible rat poison which contaminates the surroundings. The cats are super-friendly and love cuddles, but the owner told us, very emphatically, that they are WORKERS. He looked genuinely perplexed when we told him that our cat just lies around the place doing bugger all.
The tabby girl is called Tiger, on account of her lovely stripes. And, as you probably guessed at the start of this post, her almost-tuxedo brother is called, erm, Butthole, because of the way in which his weird tail curves around and accentuates his rear end. Curiously, on our second visit, his tail was initially normal but, when he saw us coming, he curled it. Apparently he is perfectly able to hold his tail normally. He just doesn’t want to.
If you are passing through the Isle of Lewis (not the most conveniently-placed thoroughfare, but anyway), please stop by at the Abhainn Dearg distillery, buy some of their incredible whisky and say hello to Tiger and Butthole.
For more Catorzian capers, please visit http://louiscatorze.com
I usually go to bed early and wake up early, whereas Cat Daddy is late to bed and late to rise. And, during our holiday, we have kept to these patterns; I am the lark and he is the nightingale, with our respective time zones about three hours apart.
When Cat Daddy was having his evening cocktail* a couple of nights ago, he noticed that an outdoor light was on. He didn’t recall switching it on himself. I imagine that he thought it was me, and cursed me for my inattention (although he won’t admit this).
He went through the whole cottage flipping every switch, yet none of them were the magical one that turned off this outside light. Eventually he went into the garden to see if, perhaps, there might be a switch somewhere outside, and he was greeted by this sight:
Oui, Mesdames et Messieurs: this cheeky sod had triggered the motion-activated security lighting.
What the flippin’ heck would a cat be doing here? There are a few farms dotted around, but he looks far too well-kept to be a farm cat. (Mind you, Louis Catorze doesn’t lift a finger around Le Château and is indulged to the point of ridiculousness, yet you all know what he looks like. So appearances don’t really mean shit.)
We are miles away from anywhere. Yet not, it seems, too far away to be given the runaround by a bastard cat.
For more Catorzian capers, please visit http://louiscatorze.com
After a dog interlude and a seagull interlude, it’s time for Le Blog to return to cats. But not Louis Catorze – at least, not just yet. This time it’s Mittens, a famous Stornoway cat who, sadly, is no longer with us, but she remains very firmly rooted in local residents’ hearts and minds.
Mittens was known for gadding about in all sorts of places, just for fun, but the Co-op in Stornoway was her favourite hang-out. Well, it’s a splendid supermarket, so why not?
When she passed away in 2022, the store displayed a wall plaque as a tribute to her, alongside a donation trolley where customers can give cat items in her honour. Most cats have such a high opinion of themselves that they would expect nothing short of an annual national holiday with open-top bus parade upon their passing, but ongoing charity towards less fortunate kitties is rather nice, too.
I asked Cat Daddy whether we could organise a similar tribute to Louis Catorze, in Brentford’s Lidl, when the little sod leaves us, but he said it wouldn’t be the same because Catorze has never actually been to Lidl. My first thought was to take him there and just let him roam free, but now I realise that Lidl shoppers don’t deserve this. In fact, no shopper does. Encountering a beautiful cat like Mittens whilst buying your weekly groceries would be a pleasant shopping experience. Having male shoppers chased down and screamed at by a small, weathered-looking black vampire beast, not so much. After all, a man’s gotta buy his bananas and his scuba diving gear in peace.
Meanwhile in TW8, Catorze is on his best behaviour, although the chat-sitteur’s social media feed is reminding her not to get too comfortable:
For more Catorzian capers, please visit http://louiscatorze.com
The Outer Hebrides really are just like heaven. In fact, if, indeed, heaven exists, rather than clouds and pearly gates and angels playing harps, we imagine it to be the same as one’s regular life but without the shit bits, just like in that book The Lovely Bones.
If we were in heaven we would live here, go for walks, visit the local shop a couple of times a week, buy what we needed, then come back, cook, eat, read books and make whisky cocktails. And we’d just keep doing those things forever.
The only thing missing, of course, is a cat. I cannot imagine heaven without a cat.
In the absence of Louis Catorze, just as when we went to the north coast of mainland Scotland, Cat Daddy has adopted a pair of gulls, whom he has named Fred and Ginger. We made the mistake of giving them some food, and now they won’t leave us alone; we have to keep presenting offerings to appease the winged gods and, when we do, Fred usually swoops before I’ve even gone back indoors, having been spying on us from some unknown location. Then he does his terrifying velociraptor call to inform Ginger of the dinner situation.
Ginger is less pushy, but Fred has no shame. When it’s time to eat, he sits outside our cottage, screeching. He was even waiting for us when we returned from one of our beach walk the other day:
So, whilst we don’t have a cat in our little slice of heaven, we aren’t short of animals who scream for food, then bully and intimidate us when we aren’t quick enough in dishing it up. It’s almost as if we never left home.
Meanwhile, back in TW8, this is what Catorze is up to. And this is why he’s going straight to hell:
For more Catorzian capers, please visit http://louiscatorze.com
Rodan and Mothra have a new cat bed. That is all.
For more Catorzian capers, please visit http://louiscatorze.com
louiscatorze.com 