louiscatorze.com

Cent coups de brosse avant d’aller dormir

25/04/2019

Today is National Hairball Awareness Day. (I’m deadly serious. Google it if you don’t believe me.) And, ironically, I am writing this after another joyless session of brushing Louis Catorze. Ugh. Bizarrely, he now only fights half-heartedly rather than with the strength of ten angry grizzly bears, yet he still screams like a banshee during our torturous sessions. And, just like the otherworldly Irish harbinger of death, I fear that there may well be some truth in his prophecy because the sound of his screams makes me want to kill either him or myself.

If he hates being brushed, why has he eased up on the struggling? Or, if has grown to tolerate it, why scream? Seeing a cat lying on his back, his body language showing that he is grudgingly accepting the brush but his voice screaming itself stupid, is quite the most absurd sight imaginable. That said, nothing about this strange cat has ever truly made sense, so I don’t suppose it’s about to start now.

Sadly there is no video available because I need three hands to be able to restrain, brush and film at the same time, and Cat Daddy refuses point-blank to help in any way. (“I’m not being part of this nonsense” is a more polite version of what he said.) So, instead, here is a picture of Sa Maj looking uncharacteristically … well … majestic. It’s hard to believe that a beast who can appear so serene in pictures can also suddenly morph in an instant into a screaming psychopath.
Plus sucré que le sucre

20/04/2019

With the grotesque sugar glutton-fest upon us (Easter, I mean, not The Great British Bake-Off), I thought it apt to mention that the sweetener xylitol is making an appearance in more and more foods. And, whilst it can be good for humans, it’s fatal to animals.

Now, dogs aren’t the most discerning diners, as I have found out from living next door to Oscar the dog. So, as a dog owner, one automatically adopts the practice of not leaving food lying around. With cats, it’s a little trickier. They’re not naturally drawn to foods containing xylitol but, because Louis Catorze, in particular, is a fastidious groomer, and because I use the raw powdered xylitol on a daily basis, I watch every stray granule.

A few weeks ago I spilled some xylitol on my head. (Long story, and so stupid that you wouldn’t believe me even if I told you.) Without thinking, I ruffled my hair to brush out all the bits and sent a fine mist of xylitol all over our mutual friend, who was on my lap. Oh. Mon. Dieu.

Cat Daddy wasn’t home at the time (hence why Catorze was on my lap) so I plunged into a complete blind panic. Should I put Le Roi under the shower? What if the heat and the water somehow melted the grains into a sweet paste which glued itself to his fur? Should I brush it all out? What if I didn’t get all the bits out? How would I know the difference between the grains of xylitol and the absolutely identical grains of unknown crud in which Catorze is often covered after rolling around outside? Should I taste them to find out? (Eurgh. What was I thinking? The panic was making me lose my mind. And, in any case, once the suspect granule was off his body, it no longer mattered what it was. NO TASTING.)

As you know, Sa Maj does not like being brushed, so it was no surprise to discover that he also doesn’t like being pinned down by my knee and having bits picked off him. But it was worth the lateness to work, the bleeding eardrums and the psychological trauma to know that my boy didn’t have a single grain of anything potentially toxic about his person by the time I had finished.

So all is now well with the world: Catorze survived me sprinkling his body with fatally toxic grains and I managed to make his body a xylitol-free zone without resorting to picking bits off his fur and eating them. I also wrote to the plastic-free company from whom I bought the product to tell them to put a clearer warning on their packaging in case others spilled it when decanting (although I didn’t tell them that I spilled it on my head) and didn’t know the dangers. And they replied within minutes and said that they would.

Below is a picture of Sa Maj’s fur after the unfortunate incident. Xylitol, outdoor crud or gross skin flakes? Luckily I picked off every last bit so that we wouldn’t have to find out.

*Obviously if your pet has consumed xylitol, or even if you think they may have done so but you aren’t sure, get them to a vet très rapidement.
Un chat dans Le Château en vaut deux dans la rue

16/04/2019
Non, non, non, Louis Catorze! This is just one of the many reasons* he is not allowed out at The Front unsupervised; rolling around on the dirty pavement that dogs have used as their toilettes is not what we want and, quite frankly, it makes me feel a little sick.

*The other reasons are:
1. Picking fights with dogs
2. Picking fights with foxes
3. Screaming outside neighbours’ houses, forcing them to return him to us when they can’t stand the racket any longer
4. Accosting neighbours as they are attempting to leave their houses and either not letting them leave, or following them, screaming
5. Rolling around in exactly this same way but IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD
On this occasion he slipped out as soon as Cat Daddy opened the front door to go to work. Naturellement, just as I sat down to have my tea, he was screaming at the door to be let in again, much to the amusement of a family passing by.

And, whilst the little sod usually avoids me, after returning from his exploits at The Front he was suddenly desperate to show me affection and to rub his gross, dirty fur all over me. He was chasing me around the house in exactly the way I do with him when it’s time to take him to the vet.

It seems that he is starting to unleash his Summer Psycho. He’s a bit early. But I don’t suppose he cares about that.
La coiffure du Roi

12/04/2019

Louis Catorze is in full-on moult mode which, of course, means we have to brush him at least once a day, more if possible. And you know how vile he is when being brushed.

The screaming is pretty awful but I am now used to it. What’s more daunting is the sheer never-endingness of the task, with handfuls of fur coming out with each session. If I were to carry on forever, at some stage I would have no cat left, just a pair of fangs and a handful of bald, quivering flesh. And yet the fur keeps coming. It defies every law of science that a cat can keep losing fur indefinitely and not run out.

I have started brushing him the wrong way first (i.e. tail to head) to loosen any crud, before then doing it the right way. This is quite effective but he really doesn’t like it at all, and it makes him look as if he has been tumble-dried. On one recent occasion he kicked free of the Stranglehold of Death and escaped outside, before I had managed the rectifying right-way brush, and he didn’t look anything like a cat nor, indeed, like any creature identifiable by zoology.

Cat Daddy: “What. Have. You. DONE?”

Sa Maj will be turning 9 at the end of the month. Something tells me that the Birthday Fairy may be delivering him some much-needed fancy new grooming-related apparatus, as I think that trying to tackle the problem with his existing brush is like trying to stem a tsunami with a sheet of blotting paper*.

*Younger followers: ask your parents.
Notre petite vie est cernée de sommeil

08/04/2019

Louis Catorze disappeared without a trace at the weekend. After hunting all over the house, including in locked cupboards, we eventually found him in the guest bedroom, buried deep underneath the duvet and utterly out of sight except for the tip of his silly little tail sticking out. So, now that the weather has turned colder, and given that he has only used his warm-weather bed a couple of times, I have reinstated his winter igloo.

The little sod initially sniffed suspiciously, as if it say, “Really? Pour moi?” But, when he realised it wasn’t some cruel trick, he was in.

Cat Daddy was disgusted when I told him, as if I had given our hypothetical human child absinthe and cigarettes. “I can’t believe you’ve GIVEN IN,” he sighed. But he felt a little better when I explained that this meant Sa Maj wouldn’t be tunnelling into the guest bedding, leaving a trail of hair and whatever other unknown crud he always seems to be covered in.

I am sure that, when the sun returns, the Sun King will be back out and on the rampage. But, for now, if anyone wants him [Cat Daddy: “I wouldn’t hold your breath, if I were you”], he can be found here:
Le printemps, c’est l’époque des projets et des plans

05/04/2019

The dark winter seems a lifetime away now, and, somehow, the longer days give us the feeling that we have so much more time to do things. That’s what it all means to us, at least. To Louis Catorze, it means burrowing deeply into his igloo and never coming out.

Cat Daddy: “This isn’t normal. Staying in there all day is like one of those sensory deprivation torture things. This is what they do to prisoners of war.”

Me: “But we’re not subjecting him to it by force. He’s chosen to go in there.”

Cat Daddy: “Exactly: he’s so thick that he doesn’t even KNOW he’s torturing himself! He’s going to come out an institutionalised vegetable with no eyes, because he’ll have evolved not to use them. And he’ll be completely brain-dead because he won’t have used that, either. On second thoughts, maybe that particular ship has already sailed.”

I did remind Cat Daddy that evolution happens progressively over many generations of creatures, and not with just one animal over a couple of weeks, but he wasn’t really listening. He had a point about the brain-dead bit, though.

If Sa Maj were our human child, we would be picking up his bed and physically tipping him out (and possibly also making him get a job, as a 9-year-old cat is probably about 50 in human years). But, because he is a cat, he just gets to lie around in his pit and not deal with any other living souls if he doesn’t want to. And the worst we will do is complain about him to strangers on the internet and transform his convertible igloo into the warmer-weather bowl shape.

Is it possible to be disgusted at his laziness and, at the same time, envious of his life?
Brexit signifie Brexit

31/03/2019

Cat Daddy has been telling Louis Catorze for some time that, as a black French immigrant with suspicious inconsistencies in his paperwork, he could very well find himself booted out after the United Kingdom leaves the European Union. But, thanks to the postponement of Brexit, the little sod is still here; with nobody knowing what the flip is going on and the rest of the world either pitying us or laughing at our incompetence, he doesn’t appear to be going anywhere yet. And, come to think of it, neither do we.

That said, none of the problems potentially affecting us humans look set to bother him in any way. Whilst Cat Daddy and I are wondering whether we should stockpile continental cheese in case it runs out, there is no such issue with Sa Maj’s treats: Lily’s Kitchen Fabulous Fish is manufactured in London, so we should have no problem keeping that coming. Jambon de Bayonne might be a little trickier to obtain, and it is highly likely to be more expensive when we do, but that’s our problem to fix, not his.

Free movement is irrelevant to Le Roi because he doesn’t travel. He stays put and people from all over the world come to him, and we have a guest book to prove it.

As for border control … well, this is meaningless to most cats as they can’t comprehend the notion of places being off-limits, but it is especially meaningless to those armed with a Cloak of Invisibility and/or the skill of teleportation. With a constant stream of neighbours, delivery people and random passers-by knocking on our door to tell us that “the cat wants to come in” when we didn’t even know he was out, we are yet to come across a border that has prevented Sa Maj from pitter-pattering where he wants.

So … will Brexit have ANY impact on him and how he lives his life? See below and try, if you will, to spot the difference between real life and my prediction for the future:

Left: life before Brexit

Right: life after Brexit
Sauver la planète

29/03/2019

Cat Daddy and I have participated in Earth Hour for as long as we can remember. It involves turning off all lights between 8:30pm and 9:30pm on the last Saturday of March, to raise awareness of climate change:

https://www.earthhour.org

The best thing about Earth Hour is making a difference with relatively little personal sacrifice although, of course, these things have the best impact if lots of people make the effort. One of our favourite Earth Hour activities is talking a walk through our street and criticising all the neighbours who still have their lights on.

The downside of Earth Hour: having a black cat, because he will be accidentally kicked, elbowed and/or sat upon at least 638 times during those 60 minutes.

This is the same black cat who, in the early hours of the morning, will pitter-patter about the house, bounce around on our bed and scream bloody murder, giving us zero doubt about where he is and what he’s doing. It would be great if he were to do that during Earth Hour so that we knew his whereabouts, and if he were to sit still and shut up when we were trying to sleep. But he wouldn’t be quite so blogworthy if he did what we wanted him to do, when we wanted him to do it.

If you don’t usually participate in Earth Hour, we hope you will give it a try this Saturday night. This is one of our pictures from last year, and Louis Catorze is in the bottom left corner (we think):
La beauté gagne quelquefois à être regardée de loin

24/03/2019

If a cat were to, erm, accidentally get hair-removing wax and baby oil on their fur, they would be ok, wouldn’t they? I’m asking on behalf of a friend.

I don’t suppose I need to explain what happened during the beautician’s visit, so I will let your imagination paint that picture on its own. And it turns out that the only way to painlessly remove salon wax is to dab the affected area with baby oil.

As you can imagine, Sa Maj wasn’t a fan of that. The little sod took off and dived under the bed with the wax only part-removed, refusing to come out. And, when I caught sight of him trying to groom it off much later, he had somehow managed to form the remaining wax and the stuck fur into a sort of pointy, greasy dreadlock on his leg.

Cat Daddy said it was my fault and that I should never have let him come in during the treatment although, had I shut him out of the room, his screaming outside the door would have sent me over the edge. In the meantime, as I write this, he is in his igloo and I daren’t attempt to check him in case the wax has made him stick to the inside. I have horrible (yet also a bit funny) visions of hearing a ripping sound as I shake him out and having him tumble undignifiedly at my feet with one bald leg.

I guess that, once the greasy leg-dreadlock has hardened, I will have to cut it off. Wrestling an oily animal who is freakishly strong when angry, with a pair of scissors in my hand: what could possibly go wrong?
Il faut cultiver notre jardin

20/03/2019
The spring equinox is here, which means brighter days and a renewed sense of joie de vivre. And, as if to mark this theme of vitality and optimism, someone or something has puked in our vegetable patch, right on the bit where we plant our salad leaves and kale.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Believe me, I thought it, too, and it was also the first thing Cat Daddy said upon discovering it (right after all the swearing). But, disgusting though this is, when you have just one animal who eats pretty much just one thing, you soon get to know what their regurgitated food looks like. This was much too copious and too, erm, orange to have been produced by Louis Catorze. I know his brew like I know my own name and, trust me, this ain’t his.

So, thoughts? The only other possible culprits are:
1. Foxes (highly likely)
2. Badgers (unlikely but not impossible)
3. Other cats (seemingly likely but we never see any in our garden, ever, so I am a little sad at the idea that they don’t come to befriend Catorze yet they make the effort to come here to vomit)
As with most other things that go on at Le Château, I don’t suppose we will ever find out the truth. In the meantime, I shall be praying for rain to wash everything away and buying my salad leaves from the supermarket.

This picture is of Sa Maj sunning himself and rocking out to the Rolling Stones during Boys’ Club, because, obviously, I wasn’t going to post a photo of the vomit.
La photographie est la littérature de l’œil

15/03/2019

Cat Daddy suggested the other day that I start an Instagram account for Louis Catorze, as “taking a photo is much easier than writing a whole blog entry” and therefore I would be able to post more often. In actual fact I do have an Instagram account for him but I have never, ever used it, so I agreed that kick-starting it could be a good idea.

However, we failed to take into account one thing: Catorze is apocalyptically rubbish in photos. He has no idea how to pose – or perhaps he does know but just doesn’t want to do it – and, since Instagram is all about making oneself look better than one does in real life, trying to run an account would be completely impossible. Each of the pictures that I post on Le Blog is the least awful one of a group of about 50 absolute howlers, so, in order to post a (passable) photo a day, I would have to take a total of 350 a week. And, what with work, life and dealing with Catorze, I simply don’t have time.

Blog entries, on the other hand, depend upon Sa Maj doing stupid shit, and this is ridiculously plentiful. In fact, he does so much of it, so often, that there aren’t enough days in the week to document it all in real time. I then have to save some of the ideas for publication the next time that he does that same piece of stupid shit (and there is always a next time).

It’s a sad day when it’s far easier to write several hundred words about stupid shit than to take one decent photo, but such is life with Le Roi.

Below is one of the worst examples of the contents of my “Recently Deleted” camera roll, which demonstrates my point. The little sod decided to jump when I was mid-snap – and, yes, those two white vertical lines are, indeed, trails left by his fangs.

Should you feel inclined to follow louiscatorze14 on Instagram, erm, I wouldn’t bother.
Le Roi Soleil, c’est un chat mystère

10/03/2019

Not long ago we had a cat-loving male friend come to Le Château for dinner. Louis Catorze loves all visitors but cat-loving men are, naturellement, the best kind.

When he arrived Catorze was all over him, up-tailed and purring. As our music grew louder and we grew drunker we didn’t notice until too late that, at some point during the proceedings, Sa Maj had disappeared. We did think it unusual for him not to partake in such an evening – predominantly-male soirées of loud rock music are very much his thing – but we weren’t concerned enough to halt our music and drinking to search for the little sod.

When our friend’s cab arrived and he opened the door to leave, in dashed Catorze from The Front where, presumably, he had been all evening.

How the flamin’ flip did he get there? (And why didn’t he use the same method to come back in again?)

We initially thought that, perhaps, he had pitter-pattered out when our friend arrived, but then we remembered the purring and flirting and the comments about how Catorze’s permanent up-tail revealed, erm, a larger-than-desirable expanse of rear end. So he definitely teleported AFTER our friend’s arrival, not during. Cat Daddy even thought I may have opened the front door during the evening to put bottles into the recycling box, but I am far too lazy to do this bottle by bottle and would much rather wait until the end of the night and take out all ~~eight~~ three bottles in one go.

However Le Roi may have managed to pull off this trick, our greater concern is that, because of our music, we wouldn’t have heard him screaming to get back in, nor would we have heard an irate neighbour losing his/her shit and knocking at our door to return him to us. This is bad. VERY bad.

I really, really need to find out how Sa Maj did this. But I probably need to apologise to our neighbours first.
Le Roi est malin: vive Le Roi!

02/03/2019

La vie est belle. It’s now March and almost officially springtime, the weekend is here, our bathroom floor is done so we no longer feel like we’re camping, Łukasz who did the work survived Louis Catorze’s screaming and is still speaking to us, and sometimes the little sod’s eyes look as if they’re getting better. They’re probably not as good as this picture would suggest – I got very lucky with the camera angle and the light – but he is behaving perfectly normally (for him) in every other way so, for the moment, we are not unduly concerned.

However, his cruel bastardliness remains constant, striking from nowhere like an earthquake and with a few little aftershocks that you should have expected but that always knock you for six.

Last night, the minute Cat Daddy sat down, the little sod got off my lap and went for his. He has, of course, done this about 873 times in the past, so this is nothing new, but previously he would at least go through the pretence of liking me for around 15 minutes before departing to the greener grass. On this occasion he didn’t even give it a minute. In fact, as soon as Cat Daddy approached to sit down, I could feel Sa Maj’s horrid, treacherous little paws fidgeting and squirming to prepare himself for his flight.

Cat Daddy felt so bad for me that he actually told his boy off for his rudeness. And, to cheer me up, we spent the next half hour complaining about him. But, at the same time, wouldn’t life be much easier if we humans could be that honest? I would love to be able to say, “I like that person better than you and, now that they’ve arrived, I would rather spend time with them,” and I am sure there are plenty who would love to say it to me, too.

Not long ago I had a visit from a friend who knows about Catorze’s mistreatment of me but has never seen it in person. I couldn’t wait for her to witness it so that I would have one person on my side (whereas Cat Daddy just pretends to be on my side to keep the peace and is really on Le Roi’s side). And, naturellement, during her visit the little sod ignored his daddy and was all over me, as if to say, “See how she lies?”

As I have always said, he has never left visible marks on a human body nor on any object; his modus operandi is psychological torture, preferably the kind that makes you look like an idiot or a fantasist if you try to prove it to others.

My friend: “Awww. But you wouldn’t have him any other way, would you?”

No comment.
Il n’y a pas que le travail dans la vie

22/02/2019

We are having some major work done in our bathroom this weekend, with the whole floor being replaced.

For most households with pets, this would require calming, anti-anxiety measures in the form of Feliway and suchlike. In our case it is the workmen, and not the pets, who will be requiring the calming, anti-anxiety measures, because Louis Catorze can’t seem to take no for an answer when it comes to men and won’t leave them alone. So we have tea ready for them in case Sa Maj is bad, and neat vodka and a cattle prod in case he is really bad.

So, at best, we can expect some mildly irritated but tea-soothed men who manage to get their work done in spite of the screaming. At worst, with all the Roi distractions and the anaesthetising glugs of vodka, a three-day job could end up taking three months to complete.

Here is the little sod carrying out his pre-work inspection and testing the acoustics of the bathroom. (It turns out that feline screaming magnifies/echoes massively in here, so I think we’re going to need more vodka.)