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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.

  • Je suis heureux, j’espère que vous l’êtes aussi

    I have completed a whole fortnight of teaching from home and survived to tell the tale.

    It was someone else’s cat – a lovely plushy ginge called Simba, belonging to one of my students – who brought my video lessons to a standstill by gatecrashing, meowing to the class and then settling on the desk to watch his small human work.

    Louis Catorze, however, saved his star turn for my online staff meeting, climbing across the keyboard, screaming. Then, when I kicked him off, he ran riot with a noisy bell toy that he had hidden behind the sofa, most likely for this very purpose.

    Apart from that, Catorze more or less left me alone and either slept through my work or annoyed the merde out of Cat Daddy instead of me. I later discovered that the sleepiness was because Cat Daddy has been wearing him out at extended Boys’ Club which starts at around 9pm and goes on long into the night/morning.

    Being at home all day means I have been able to take a cheeky peek into the once-mysterious ways of Le Club, and I can report that Cat Daddy and Catorze have been enjoying lengthy late-night music sessions together. This is mostly old-school prog rock, but they’ve been going through a new wave phase recently. Sa Maj bounces up and down on his daddy’s knees to Elvis Costello’s “Welcome to the working week” in an ironic nod to the fact that neither of them know what one is, whilst I still slave away like a chump. That said, I am very much aware of how lucky I am to still have a job.

    Cat Daddy recently announced – after a few too many sloe gins, I might add – that he wanted to create a cat-themed playlist for their music club. This is excellent news as it saves me doing the same job for Catorze’s birthday.

    The songs that we already know are as follows:

    1. Lovecats (The Cure)

    2. Cool for Cats (Squeeze)

    3. What’s New Pussycat (Tom Jones)

    4. Stray Cat Strut (Stray Cats), although the bit about the lady cats, of course, doesn’t apply

    5. Louie Louie (The Kingsmen)

    6. Sun King (The Cult)

    Six songs aren’t much of a playlist, but never fear: Cat Daddy and Catorze are on the case, and I am confident that the list will be complete by 30th April. And Cat Daddy has trained his boy so well that he sits happily in a room with loud, blasting music and doesn’t even blink (see photo below for proof), so they will probably work on the list together.

    Me: “Does Louis prefer vinyl or streaming?” (It’s important to get this right for the party, after all, even though the party will end up being just the four* of us.)

    [*Cat Daddy, me, Catorze and the mouse whom I know is still at large, even though I can’t prove it.]

    Cat Daddy, firmly and without hesitation: “Streaming.”

    Me: “You seem very sure about that.”

    Cat Daddy: “Yes. Because vinyl means I have to get up and change the record, and that disturbs him.”

    Of course.

    Here is Catorze in his happy place. Would you believe, the little sod actually got up and moved closer to the speaker when David Bowie came on:

    “Je n’ai jamais fait rien de bien …”

  • La vie en quarantaine

    This turbulent period of time seems to be bringing out the furthermost extremes of human behaviour.

    The good: Everyone in our street is sharing provisions (responsibly) and looking out for each other. And, last weekend, we had a quarantine barbecue with Oscar the dog’s family – them in their garden, us in ours, separate food and drink – of which the highlight (for us, probably not for them) was Oscar stealing three stuffed vine leaves from their table when nobody was looking, and letting his innocent human sister get the blame.

    The bad: Most of the population of TW8 don’t give a hoot about social distancing. They stride along in the middle of the pavement, expecting the rest of us to move out of their way and not noticing or caring whether we do or don’t. We have seen many walkers and sweaty, virus-propagating runners with zero regard for the two-metre rule, happily letting us step into oncoming traffic to avoid them whilst they remain steadfastly on course for their new personal best. We have also seen not one but TWO cyclists, on separate occasions, cycling along the pavement whilst looking their phones. I used to think the reason why people in TW9 and W4 look down on us is because our neighbourhood is less posh. Erm, it’s not that.

    The ugly: Cat Daddy and his boozy pub mates have been regularly meeting for drinks via Skype/Zoom/whatever. I don’t join in – video calls are my idea of torture, even with people whom I like – but I eavesdrop for the comedy value. Because they are all, erm, blokes of a certain age, the first 15 minutes of their virtual meets usually sound like this: “Tim, turn your microphone on.” “Pete, do you know that you’re sideways?” “Why are some of us in circles and some of us in squares?”

    Louis Catorze’s life, on the other hand, continues as normal. He has Lily’s Kitchen Fabulous Fish aplenty – which, Cat Daddy remarks, will also serve us well if we run out of food and end up having to eat Catorze* – and we just about managed to squeeze in a jambon de Bayonne order before the curtain fell on Ocado. The only slight change for Catorze is that Le Jardin is now Le Fitness Suite with Cat Daddy’s stationary bike and my exercise step. Other than that, c’est la même chose. And, despite having been Côned for much longer than anyone ever thought possible, the little sod is happy and enjoying life.

    We hope that you and your furry overlords are all managing to stay safe. If you are local and we can help you in any way, please let us know.

    *Don’t worry, we would never actually eat Catorze. Mainly because there is barely any meat on him.

    “Cat Daddy has prepared a dish of chat farci au poisson fabuleux.”

  • Le courage fait des disciples

    Not that I concern myself unduly with numbers – it’s all about quality rather than quantity for me – but it seems that the frequency of my recent postings has cost me a few followers.

    To be honest, I get it. I appreciate that people don’t want to read quite so many posts, and that one can have too much of a good thing (although Cat Daddy would argue that Louis Catorze cannot, by any reasonable interpretation, be regarded as a “good thing”).

    Believe me, it was never my intention to post almost every day. However, documenting each detail of Catorze’s condition and all the associated developments is a very useful record for me and, had I not done so, I think I would have struggled to remember what we’ve done and what we haven’t. There have been so many vet appointments, medications and tests that, after a point, they all blur into one.

    If you are still here, thank you so much for bearing with us and for supporting us despite having greater priorities at the moment than a silly French vampire cat who won’t do as he’s told. Let’s hope that this wave of saddening news – both Catorze’s and those of the world in general – will soon pass.

    “Merci à tous!”

  • Se gratter sans ongles

    Damn this horrid little sod. Anyone would think he didn’t want to get better.

    Last week we found Louis Catorze with suspicious new sore patches on his face, indicating that he had found an inventive, secret way of scratching (again). For days we puzzled over how on earth he could possibly have done it, given that he is supervised 99% of the time due to his wicked and untrustworthy nature. Then we discovered that, during his sessions in the exercise yard, he had been darting out of sight behind the shed and scratching himself on a bunch of sticking-out bamboo canes.

    We never bothered checking up on him when he went there because it’s only a tiny crawl space the same length and width as Catorze, and we knew that Le Cône prevented him from going far. The space is pictured below, and you can see the offending bamboo canes just above and to the right of him. Cat Daddy has now moved the canes but I’m pretty sure that, even if we put them on the moon, Catorze would find them.

    Our vet practice closed last week to minimise the risk of spreading the virus. The W5 and TW3 branches are remaining open for emergencies only – and, no, the irreparable damage to both our sanity and our will to live still doesn’t deem this an emergency – so we really can’t afford to have this turn bad. It seems we are going to have to ramp up our surveillance even more intensely, and possibly even – gasp – reintroduce the full Cône when the inmate is out of sight.

    Cat Daddy explained to his boy the other day that we all have to live with constraints during these difficult times, however much we dislike it.

    Catorze replied with a “Mwah”. Sadly I don’t think it was the good kind.

    Caught you, you little shite.

  • Le plaisir de Sa Majesté

    Last week, Cat Daddy was the one to drop the ball in our duty of care to Louis Catorze. This time it was my turn.

    I had just let the little sod outside for some fresh air when I suddenly remembered that I had to prepare for a work video call, and therefore an old sports t-shirt and hair tied up in a bun with a pair of knickers simply wouldn’t do. So I left Catorze outside, thinking “What possible mischief could he get into in the few minutes it will take me to change into my work clothes?” (I know, I know.)

    Then Dog Mamma sent me these photos:

    What the …?
    Don’t even THINK about it!

    Oh. Mon. Dieu.

    Catorze can no longer access the playground at The Back (because he can’t fit through the gap in the fence with his Cône), so it seems that he was trying to get in over the top instead. Because there is a wire fence right up against the wooden fence to catch stray tennis balls, he would probably have fallen through the tiny gap between the two fences and ended up stuck halfway down, limbs flailing and screaming undignifiedly. And, because the school is closed, he would have remained there until who-knows-when.

    So the new Château rule is that flight-risk prisoners cannot be left unsupervised in the exercise yard, not even for a second. At least we are in the fortunate position of having two wardens per inmate.

  • Les mains sales (Partie 2)

    I am sure that you already knew this, Mesdames et Messieurs, but hand sanitising gel and cats don’t mix. In short, it’s because the former contains alcohol and/or tea tree and the latter are prolific lickers (especially of things that we don’t want them to lick).

    If you’ve had to use hand sanitising gel during an unavoidable trip out, it might be a good idea to wash your hands normally with hot water and soap or hand wash – not with more gel – before you stroke your pets. Admittedly it’s unlikely that you would transfer enough gel for them to do themselves serious damage, but we have enough to deal with right now without having to add vet visits into the mix.

    We use liquid soap from Scent Trail (see link below), who are kind enough to custom-make a fragrance-free version especially for Louis Catorze. They are a small U.K. business who are very mindful of animal welfare, and I am sure that they would appreciate any orders at this time.

    https://www.scent-trail.co.uk/ourshop/cat_584899-Liquid-Soap.html

    Ugly hands need washing, too.

  • Les petites pilules irrégulières

    I don’t know whether collecting Louis Catorze’s medication from the vet is something that most would class as an “essential journey” but, yesterday – BEFORE the announcement from our esteemed leader, I might add – it was essential to us.

    The little sod’s next steroid shot is due in the first week of April and, because we have no idea what state the world will be in by then, we contacted the vet to ask about a tablet version that we could administer at home. Catorze is quite hit and miss when it comes to pills – sometimes he will happily eat them in a Pill Pocket, sometimes he won’t – but we can’t risk injection time coming around and us not being allowed to leave the house.

    We walked the seven minutes or so to the vet practice just before 6pm, when we knew the streets would be quieter, having paid for the pills over the phone beforehand. When we arrived, the nurse put down the bottle on the doorstep and I picked it up after she had closed the door. It’s all quite surreal and strange, like some post-apocalyptic horror film, and the ominous sense of dread increased in triplicate when I realised that it wasn’t just one or two pills but a course of two a day, for two weeks. Oh. Mon. Dieu.

    Here is Catorze, using his quarantine time to project some very artistic shadow shapes with Le Cône. Please stay safe, everyone.

    And that’s why they call him the Sun King.

  • 28 jours plus tard

    We can’t believe that today marks four weeks of Louis Catorze being Côned, when it was only supposed to be a day or two. Nor can we believe how much life has changed because of Le Cône and its limitations. Our usual Catorzian tasks, which used to take seconds, now take considerably longer, or require constant supervision, or both. Plus there are now additional tasks that didn’t exist before.

    In order to deal with all this, Cat Daddy and I organised a rota: he manages the Day Shift from whenever he wakes up until 6pm, we both share the Evening Shift from 6pm until around 10:30pm and then I take over the Night Shift.

    For the last four weeks, my days have looked like this:

    1. Wake up 30 minutes earlier than usual.

    2. Trojan Horse pill (for Catorze, I mean).

    3. Assisted breakfast at the special height-adjusted feeding station. (I have mixed success when it comes to getting him to eat breakfast, so I often have to leave handover notes for the Day Shift stating that I failed dismally and asking him to reattempt the task.)

    4. Water glass is filled to almost-overflowing to accommodate Le Cône. (Again, there is mixed success in actually getting him to drink from it.)

    5. Supervised time in the exercise yard.

    6. Itch-relieving neck rubs and Aveda Tulasāra facial brushing sessions. (For the first fortnight, Catorze would wake me every 2-3 hours for these.)

    7. Eye-cleaning with warm water and one of my nieces’ old baby muslins. Catorze welcomes this about as much as he would appreciate being waterboarded.

    8. Ointment application to what’s left of his self-harm facial wounds. Again, the patient is not massively receptive to this.

    9. I go to work, leaving handover notes for the Day Shift.

    10. Day Shift staff sends me photos of various madcap antics.

    11. I go home and we both share the Evening Shift. I often walk into the house to find Catorze on his daddy’s lap and the pair of them rocking out to Pink Floyd or suchlike.

    Now, of course, my days will look just as they did above from points 1 to 8 onwards. But point 9 will most likely involve wrestling Catorze off me as he clambers all over my laptop and screams bloody murder, whilst my video-taught students stare in through the screen and giggle.

    It has been a testing few weeks, but we hope that normal life can resume soon. Well, as normal as can be in these strange times.

    Below are some of the handover messages exchanged with the Day Shift. We have named it “Who wrote it: cat owner or medical professional?”

  • Un régal pour les yeux

    You’ve got to admire Louis Catorze’s positivity: even in Le Cône and with all the doors and windows shut, when he saw me coming with the Flamazine* the other day he still thought he could outrun me.

    We had been granting him very limited and controlled Cône-free time behind closed (and locked) doors, to allow him to wash. Initially he would wash his sore bits too roughly, so Le Cône would be slapped back on after just a couple of minutes. But, over the last week, we had managed to progressively extend the Cône-free time and had worked our way up to a good hour or so.

    However, the other night, on Cat Daddy’s watch, Le Cône was taken off and Sa Maj fell asleep on his daddy’s lap. But, after a few too many bottles glasses of Louis Latour (yes, it is an actual wine), Cat Daddy fell asleep, too. And sneaky Catorze took advantage of his daddy’s pass-out and now has a sore eye due to unsupervised over-zealous washing.

    The wound is, no doubt, very itchy as it heals, so the little sod has resumed his efforts to scratch. He has also started to refuse the morning Piriton that he used to eat quite happily in a Pill Pocket.

    Anyway, the new rule is: no unCôned time whilst intoxicated. And, although intoxication feels like the only way we can deal with all that’s going on in the world right now, it’s a sacrifice we are willing to make for our boy.

    *Flamazine should not be ingested, so wash time cannot coincide with ointment time.

    What a mess.

  • Le Spécial

    It’s rather ironic that, after panicking that Louis Catorze’s skin flare-up might be an allergic reaction to The Special One (my merino wool scarf), and after shutting myself away and panic-speed-knitting like an absolute demon to finish the darned thing quickly, there is now no football due to the Covid 19 virus.

    I finished the scarf quite some time ago, but it’s now sitting in the under-stairs cupboard, out of reach of curious pitter-pattering paws. The plan was to take it out on match days only, handling it very gently both to keep it from unravelling – because I accidentally cut off two stray ends of wool before I had knotted them, and now they are too short to knot – and to stop too many stray fibres from being dislodged and transferred onto La Personne Royale. But now, of course, with no football and with the weather turning unscarfworthy, it lives permanently in its dark prison, having barely seen the light of day.

    After researching merino wool, I have discovered that it’s actually LESS likely to trigger a reaction than many other fabrics. But, since we will probably never know the cause of Sa Maj’s irritation, we intend to keep treating the scarf in the way one would handle an unexploded World War II bomb. And, knowing Catorze, it would be typical of him to be allergic to a hypoallergenic substance just to be difficult.

    They say that the football is only on hold until 3rd April, but this seems like an eternity. And the thought of having to fill in the time by making actual conversation, with actual people, about things that aren’t football, makes me shudder.

    What a good thing there are still cats.

    “Où est le football?”

  • “EvanesCône!”

    Although the healing process doesn’t look very attractive, Louis Catorze’s recovery is progressing as it should.

    Cat Daddy: “Ugh. I wish we could send him away somewhere until he starts to look decent. Mind you, his “decent” still isn’t really decent, is it?”

    In other news, it had to happen sooner or later, Mesdames et Messieurs: Le Roi has found a way of detaching the front part of Le Cône.

    I found him only half-Côned when I woke up one morning, despite the fact that Cat Daddy and I had agreed never to leave him that way unsupervised. My immediate assumption was that Cat Daddy had forgotten to fully-Cône him after a riotous Boys’ Club of Jägerbombs, absinthe shots and suchlike. But it turned out that he HAD remembered, and now the little sod has lost the detachable section. Furthermore, we haven’t the faintest idea where it is.

    The little sod is most certainly the Master of Dark Arts.

    Thank goodness, then, for Le Deuxième Cône; having two of them means we can borrow the detachable part from the one that he isn’t wearing. Although this has now messed up The System, were it not for this we would be royally dans la merde.

    *EDIT: not long after I wrote the above, Cat Daddy found the missing piece of Le Cône in our bed.

    Catorze is modelling the main body of Le Deuxième Cône, accessorised with the detachable section of Le Premier Cône.

    “Je suis le meilleur magicien.”

  • Le deuxième Cône

    Louis Catorze has been Côned for almost three weeks – far longer than any of us expected or wanted – in which time he has managed to do the following:

    – Escape over the fence into That Neighbour’s garden during supervised outdoor time, Cône and all, and get stuck coming back

    – Escape over the fence into Oscar the dog’s territory, as above

    – Escape out at The Front, after which he was promptly apprehended by Cat Daddy with the stern words: “The Front is no place for a Côned cat!”

    We have also made the following discovery, Mesdames et Messieurs: Cônes get DIRTY.

    Forget about washing my hands to avoid spreading Coronavirus: if I could amputate mine every time I touched Le Cône, I would. (And, unfortunately, touching is inevitable as we are constantly having to straighten it or detach the front part.)

    Having seen the little sod scratch it with his gross back feet, lick it, dribble on it and even – shudder – rub it on his arse* when attempting to clean himself whilst wearing it, we decided that it would be a good idea to clean it.

    Now, our problems with this were as follows:

    1. The fabric edges would need time to dry out after cleaning.

    2. Leaving Catorze sans Cône whilst waiting for it to dry was absolutely out of the question. (He is noticeably less itchy since the vet visit on Tuesday, but we don’t trust him quite yet.)

    *Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, animal owners, but, if your pet is Côned for any period of time, you can be certain that they will have attempted to clean their lower portions at some stage, and therefore there will be ANIMAL ARSE ON LE CÔNE.

    Cat Daddy’s ideas were:

    1. Clean Le Cône, then put it back on Catorze immediately, whether or not it were fully dry (nope).

    2. One of us could physically restrain him during the time it took to dry (HELL, nope).

    The other option – and the worst of the lot – was, of course, to just leave it without cleaning, and there was no way I would allow that to happen, especially in the midst of an antibacterial product famine.

    So I bought a second Cône. And Catorze wore it whilst the other was drying.

    It was £10.80 very, very well spent indeed.

    Enjoying some fully-Côned and chaperoned time in the exercise yard.

  • L’ennemi externe

    Louis Catorze’s biopsy results are in. And it seems that, whilst he appears to have ninety-nine problems, an autoimmune disease ain’t one.

    Although the test can’t pinpoint the exact cause, it’s looking likely that he is triggered by one or more external allergens rather than by having something intrinsically wrong with his body. So, after many years of Cat Daddy muttering “Knowing him, he’s probably just allergic to himself”, this has now officially been declared unlikely.

    This is further forward than we have ever been before with the little sod.

    Here is a summary of the treatments that he had on Tuesday night:

    1. Removal of biopsy stitches.

    2. Antibacterial ointment (Flamazine) applied to his now-healing self-harm wounds.

    3. A dose of Advocate alongside his Broadline to rule out a flea allergy, because the vet found traces of flea poo* in his fur. (Yes, I do flea-treat him every month. No, I have never missed a dose.)

    4. A souped-up version of the month-long steroid shot, because now we know for sure that Catorze doesn’t have some freakish, as-yet-undiscovered-by-science-but-soon-to-be-named-after-him medical condition which could be worsened by steroids.

    * FLEA POO. THE POO OF FLEAS. MY LIFE WILL NEVER BE THE SAME AGAIN NOW THAT I KNOW THIS IS A THING.

    We have discussed with the vet the possibility of a hypoallergenic diet, but Catorze has been on Lily’s Kitchen Fabulous Fish since May 2018, long before his symptoms reappeared, plus Lily’s Kitchen have written to me to confirm that all their recipes are hypoallergenic anyway. So Cat Daddy and I have agreed that we won’t implement a change of diet until later on, and only if all else fails. We have been guilty in the past of throwing too many solutions at Catorze and not really having any idea of which ones – if any – have worked, so I don’t think it’s a bad idea to be a little more measured this time around and to try one thing at a time.

    The relatively newly-introduced Delicious Chicken, however, is off the menu, and my friend’s cat Boots will be the happy recipient of the brand new, unopened pack currently sitting in our cupboard. Even though he is a meaty monster and the last thing he needs is more food (see photo below for proof).

    Anyway, the thought of flea poo has disgusted us so profoundly that we are now busily washing cushions and blankets on an extra-hot wash, and Cat Daddy is giving serious thought to replacing our fabric sofa with a leather one (and claiming the money back from Sa Maj’s sick fund).

    We are hoping beyond hope that this will mark a turnaround in the little sod’s health.

    This Boots is made for eating.

  • Les envahisseurs doivent mourir

    Good news: Louis Catorze has something new to take his mind off his health woes.

    Bad news: WE HAVE A MOUSE IN OUR LIVING ROOM.

    The phrases “This is the last thing we need” and “You couldn’t make this shit up” were INVENTED for this household. And this is probably my punishment for laughing at Puppy Mamma that time when she was taking garden refuse to the tip and a mouse jumped out of the sack of wisteria trimmings and ran riot in her car.

    Now, how on earth a Côned cat – who is only allowed outdoors under supervision – could possibly bring in a mouse is beyond me. I imagine it’s more likely that this mouse just randomly wandered in but, all the same, I wouldn’t put anything past Catorze.

    Anyway, this is how the farcical events unfolded from around 7am on Monday:

    1. I catch sight of the invader beast not long after Catorze’s morning feed.

    2. I attempt to draw Catorze’s attention to the invader beast. Catorze, who is half-Côned and washing his arse, is utterly oblivious.

    3. I debate whether to unCône Catorze or to wake Cat Daddy, and I finally decide upon the latter. Cat Daddy is highly displeased but comes to my aid armed with, erm, a beer tankard and a chopping board.

    4. Cat Daddy pulls out furniture and boxes and lifts things (mainly cat toys) off the floor but, each time, the wily mouse darts elsewhere and evades capture.

    5. Catorze finally stops washing his arse and spots the mouse. Cat Daddy suggests unCôning him to see if he will catch it. Cône comes off.

    6. Catorze immediately starts scratching. Cône goes back on.

    7. Cat Daddy eventually manages to corner the mouse among the wires under the television unit.

    8. Catorze takes a flying leap across the floor and under the unit, Cône and all, and lands squarely on top of the wires, dislodging Cat Daddy’s hands and allowing the mouse to run free once again.

    9. Cat Daddy declares that “it’s all too much: first Boris Johnson, then Coronavirus and now this” and goes back to bed.

    Our living room remains in disarray, with furniture all over the place, and the mouse is still at large. And, despite not being very well, Catorze is dutifully keeping watch. You have to admire his tenacity, even though I can’t think of a less efficient rodent sentinel than a Côned cat.

    This is going to be a long week.

    “À gauche, Papa! Non, à droite!”