His thyroid reading is now at a healthy level, which means that his medication is at the right dosage for him. However, his kidney reading is slightly elevated, most likely due to the thyroid medication “unmasking” a previously-hidden kidney condition (that same one that seems to come for all old cats in the end).
This isn’t the best news, but it’s perhaps not surprising at his age.
The vet’s next suggestions were as follows:
A urine sample to confirm the kidney disease. Given that Catorze doesn’t use a litter tray, and didn’t even use one when he was Côned and under house arrest for months, extracting this from him is not going to be fun.
A diet of shitty renal food. Well, ok, the vet didn’t use quite these same words to sell it, although she did say that most cats found the food “not very palatable”. Catorze refuses jamón serrano because it’s not as nice as jamón ibérico, and once went on hunger strike for two days because I wouldn’t give him Michelin-starred hot-smoked salmon as his regular food. Is it likely that he will eat Royal Canin renal food, containing 4% meat and 96% scrapings from the factory floor?
Cat Daddy and I have some thinking to do. Meanwhile, Sa Maj has just had an ice cube massage and is out enjoying the sun, as a Sun King should.
I’m saving that piece of ice to do his tail.He’s more dinosaur than cat here.
We have had some searingly hot days recently, and having to go to school through it has been pretty grim.
However, Louis Catorze is fine, merci for asking, because his ice cube massages have become a regular, daily thing, so much so that we’ve even put it on the House Document for our holiday chat-sitteur. Even Cat Daddy looks at his watch, around late afternoon, and says, “Isn’t it time he had his ice bath?”
Catorze can’t get enough of it. When he sees the ice cube coming, just as he does with his brush, he’s a little alarmed but, once he realises what it is, he settles into it, purring and purring.
Yes, we do admit that part of us enjoys making Catorze look silly. And, yes, we do mess around with the ice. Sometimes we place two pieces on his head, like horns:
Ice devil.
And, sometimes, we line pieces along his back, like they do in publicity photos for hot stone massage:
Catorze is the one on the right. (The left picture is from facesspa.com.)
Once the ice cubes have completely melted away, and he’s covered in a layer of cold water, Catorze pitter-patters off to lie down and dry off. The next day, at the hottest point of the day, we start again.
We all know that the little sods are spoiled, but how many of them have their own personal masseurs? (And, if yours don’t, perhaps they should?)
He loves it.
*WARNING: if the ice gets stuck to them, leave it to melt off on its own. Trying to pull it off won’t work. Don’t ask us how we know this.
When it’s a Dantean hellfire outside, what could be more fun than dragging a scowling animal, in the car, to a place that he really hates?
Cat Daddy and I had hoped to delay this vet visit until just before our holiday, but Louis Catorze has been uncomfortably scratchy, to the point of breaking the skin around his eyes and ears. It’s not visible in the photo below but, trust me, in the right light it looks awful.
Catorze was chillingly and unusually silent on the car journey there, but let loose in the waiting room, where there was enough of an audience to make it worthwhile: us, two receptionists, plus a couple whose two trembling white cats were so tightly entwined in their transportation pod that we initially thought it was just one cat. Every so often, one of the white cats would unwind themselves, look out to see what the noise was all about, then return to the comfort of snuggling their sibling. I can’t imagine what Catorze was saying, but I imagine he was like one of those evangelical Armageddon people whom everyone tries to avoid – you know, the ones who stand in the street and shout, “The world is doomed! We’re all gonna DIE!”
Catorze is now down to 2.87kg, which is no surprise on account of the fact that it’s CST*; he’s been doing intermittent fasting for a while now, with his eating window being between 9pm and 1am. However, it seems that he was due another blood test three weeks after starting his thyroid medication, to determine whether the dose was right for him, and we didn’t do it. The vet may well have told me that it was required, but I forgot. Oh dear.
*Catorzian Summer Time.
I asked if he could have the blood test there and then, and warned the vet that it may have to be a two-person job. She replied that the vet nurse was available to help her, adding, “But then Louis is usually pretty good when he comes in, isn’t he?”
Cat Daddy: “…”
Me: “…” (Although it was tempting to respond with, “That must’ve been some other black cat”.)
Whilst they did the test, we sat in the waiting room. The couple that we’d met upon arrival came out from their consultation, the white cats having separated in their transportation pod so we could easily see that there were two of them. Clearly all cats have A Thing that they do when they realise that the torment is over. (Catorze’s Thing is just shutting the hell up.)
Catorze was returned to us after a few minutes, with the vet reporting that he didn’t bite or scratch during the blood test but was “very wriggly, quite the contortionist”. And, when they asked us to hand over the eye-watering sum of £452.39 (not a typo), I let out a whimper of such deep sorrow that the receptionist actually apologised.
We are now home, recovering in front of a fan and wondering how it’s come to this. Catorze, however, has gone gadding about outside in some unknown location, and is probably trying to work out an inventive new way of costing us money.
This is Willow, whose human brother was, until last week, one of my students:
What a sweet girl.
For the last three years I have seen photos of Willow, and she was even mentioned in her human brother’s French speaking exam, in what would otherwise have been quite a boring task to conduct. (“Je voudrais réserver une table pour quatre personnes et aussi mon chien.”) Willow and I had never met face to face until the day of her human brother’s last exam, when he brought her to school to meet me.
We’d agreed to meet at 11:40 but it was past midday when they finally arrived. “Sorry we’re late, Miss. It took her half an hour to walk here because she’s only got short legs.” Poor Willow was a bit scared to approach me, probably because I was loud like an over-excitable child. But, eventually, she did let me stroke her.
Anyone walking past my school that day will have seen me lying belly-down on the ground, taking photos of a slightly suspicious sausage dog. Yet I don’t suppose it would be the weirdest thing anyone’s seen here.
Good luck to Willow’s human brother in his future endeavours, and hopefully I will see him, or one of his family, walking her in the park every now and again.
When it’s a raging Dantean hellfire outside, and you are a black animal covered in fur, you may find it difficult to keep cool.
What a stroke of luck, then, that ice cube massages are a thing. If you don’t know what they are, they’re exactly as they sound. And Louis Catorze LOVES them.
Here is one, in action:
Doing this makes ME feel sweaty. But then it’s not about me.
And this is how, erm, radiant and beautiful you look afterwards:
What do you mean, we only do it to make him look silly? Ahem.Letting it all dry off in the blazing sun.
Yesterday was the summer solstice, one of our favourite days of the year. Whilst most of the northern hemisphere will have marked the day with celebration, here at Le Château it’s war, and the avian army have placed a bounty on Louis Catorze’s head.
Now, you’d imagine that, if your cat didn’t like the local wildlife and vice versa, it wouldn’t really have much impact on your day-to-day life. However, here, when one party annoys the other, it results in a huge, cacophonous din in the early hours of the morning, after which it’s difficult to get back to sleep. And, yes, when we wake up to infernal avian screeching, we know it’s because of Catorze. I’ve actually got out of bed to look, and seen it with my own eyes.
So we have the option of stiflingly hot nights with windows shut and less noise, or a slight breeze with windows open and parakeets, magpies or whoever else making the most ungodly racket as soon as it’s light. Neither one is particularly pleasant.
Here are the starlings, eyeing up their target on the morning of the solstice:
The magpies will be here later, for the afternoon shift, and the parakeets will take over in the evening. Whatever the time of day, some sort of feathered sentinel will be watching.
Our lovely poppies are out. (Apologies for the background noise; someone decided to have an altercation with a magpie, just as I started recording.)
Louis Catorze’s summer mode has been activated. Well, it’s been Catorzian Summer Time for a little while now, to be honest; it hasn’t just happened now, in time for the summer solstice. But he has just stopped eating breakfast, a classic sign that his body clock has changed.
This is partly because he’s naturally unhungry in the warmer months, but also because he’s up late for Boys’ Club, and Cat Daddy may have* been dishing up extra-large portions of nocturnal snacks.
*I say “may have” because, due to the involvement of copious amounts of alcohol, nobody is quite sure.
CST doesn’t stop Catorze from REQUESTING breakfast. He sits by his bowl, with his tail wrapped neatly around his feet, creepy-staring at me. But, when I serve him, he pitter-patters off outside, not coming back to his food for several hours.
Cat Daddy: “I think he likes the reassurance of just knowing there will be food when he comes back.”
I don’t suppose Charles Darwin would have seen any sense in saving food for later, in a non-secure location, whilst the animal went gadding about. But then I don’t suppose his studies extended to alien cryptids like Catorze, either.
Here he is, enjoying his favourite season of the year:
Living with such a weird cat as Louis Catorze means that we are often asking, “Why?”
We ask him. We ask ourselves. Sometimes we even ask the mysterious, invisible forces that control the universe. Sadly, we are yet to receive any kind of answer.
We ought to be used to this by now yet, a couple of days ago, we were forced to hurl out our most urgent “WHY?” so far. For Catorze, on that fine day, chose a freezer bag as his latest sleeping spot:
Cheeky sod snarled at me as I took this picture.
I won’t bother to bore you with the long list of sleeping spots that he already has, because you know all those already. I’ll just leave you to do as we are, and ask, “Why?”
When I came downstairs yesterday morning, Louis Catorze was out cold on the sofa in the kitchen. I talked to him, to make sure he was still alive, and he lifted his head and let out a breathy, feeble “Mwah”, before going back to sleep again.
Nope – he’s out.
Don’t worry, he wasn’t ill. In fact, I knew exactly what had happened: the little sod was exhausted after an extended, late-night Boys’ Club the night before. And nothing, not even Armegeddon, was going to shake him out of it.
I did my usual early morning kitchen things, including using the coffee maker, which is loud enough to rouse most people from a catatonic state. NO REACTION FROM CATORZE. It then dawned on me that, perhaps, this would be a good opportunity to give him his thyroid medication.
I crept around like a stealthy ninja, opening cupboards and assembling my arsenal of thyroid medication paraphernalia in absolute silence. Then, when I laid the rubber glove on the kitchen worktop, it made a barely-perceptible flick sound.
Oh dear.
In an instant, Catorze’s head whipped around like a Jurassic Park velociraptor. And he was off, out through the cat flap and into the Zone Libre, where he knew perfectly well that I’d never be able to catch him.
Remind me, for long do we have to keep doing this? What? For the rest of his life, y’say?
Cat Daddy was supposed to be away at a music festival this weekend but, because of his knee injury, he’s stuck here.
I am trying to cheer him up by bringing a festival vibe to Le Château – listening to the bands that he would have seen at the festival, pouring him warm, flat beer with bits of grass in it, making him queue for thirty minutes for the toilet, that kind of thing – but I can tell that he’s disappointed. He’d rather be at the festival than being screamed at by an abnormally small, toothy Chat Noir. In fact, wouldn’t we all?
Louis Catorze is, obviously, delighted to have his papa here. Cat Daddy, not so much.
A bit of quiet time with a book.
Cat Daddy has always been highly embarrassed about the fact that I refer to him as Cat Daddy. The only reason he puts up with it, other than not being able to do anything about it, is because very few of the followers of Le Blog know him, so he can hide behind a mysterious cloak of (relative) anonymity. He thinks that people who refer to their pets as children are absurd and, if ever I suggest that he is Catorze’s daddy, he retorts, “I am NOT. He is a cat and I am a human. I am his male feeder.”
So, having asked Catorze, “Has your daddy fed you?”, nothing gave me more smug pleasure than having Cat Daddy reply, “No, I haven’t yet”.
Ha. Cat Daddy has owned up to being Cat Daddy. This is proof that he loves his boy, and now the world knows it.
Here is one of my favourite pictures of Catorze and his DADDY (not “male feeder”), taken in 2020. If you and your furry overlords are celebrating Fathers’ Day tomorrow, I hope you enjoy your weekend as much as this:
*It’s Partie 2 because this is the second time I’ve used this title. It’s clearly not the second time Louis Catorze has ever screamed.
This is the face – and voice – of someone who has ignored me since I returned home after being out all morning, but who wants to be my friend now that I am making mackerel pâté:
For the love of God, MAKE IT STOP.
I offered him some Orijen, but that was met with one sniff and his “Go home; you’re embarrassing yourself” look. Catorze may be thicker than a concrete milkshake, but even he knows that what I’m offering isn’t the thing emitting the sublime fishy fragrance.
Anyway, I was forced to eat my snack standing up. And, even when it was all gone, Catorze wasn’t done; the sublime fishy fragrance still lingered, and the little sod alternated between glaring, suspicious sniffing and more screaming, in an effort to guilt me into revealing where I had hidden the mackerel.
Cat Daddy, resignedly and without looking up from his phone: “He’s like this all the time, and he’s getting worse.”
This is true. But, in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t help. It simply leaves us as we were before, except with a strange ringing in our ears and a few more years taken off our lives.
What an absolute cirque de merde of a weekend we have just had.
Cat Daddy had booked our car for an MOT at a service centre some distance from where we live now, yet not far from the first house that he and I shared together years ago. So our plan was to leave the car and kill some time going for a lovely, nostalgic walk through our old haunts.
It went well for a while. Well, the weather was shit at first, but then the storm clouds cleared to reveal turquoise skies and glorious sun. However, the earlier rain had turned part of our walking route into a death trap, and the combination of this plus substandard shoes caused poor Cat Daddy to slip, injuring his knee.
The rucksack that he was carrying ended up scraped across the muddy ground underneath him, and needed a good wash when we came home. And, naturellement, as it dried outside, a certain little sod couldn’t resist:
Louis Catorze has chosen some odd places to sleep over the years, and a slightly-damp rucksack, with uncomfortable zips and hard toggles, is the weirdest of the lot. That said, if he ever started to make sense, it would either mean that Armageddon were nigh or that someone had swapped him for another black cat.
Here he is, enjoying his new bed:
What the actual …
*EDIT: the car failed its MOT. And, when we got on the bus to return to the car service centre, the bus driver accelerated so suddenly that it gave me whiplash and I still have pain in my neck and shoulders. So the day was a true disaster in every sense.
louiscatorze.com 