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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.

  • Vivre la vie folle

    What does freedom mean to you?

    Maybe Rodan would like to answer this? Or Louis Catorze? Or any cat who has had to spend time in Le dreaded Cône?

    After healing up nicely since sustaining injuries from a fight, Rodan was released from Le Cône. However, immediately upon release, the silly sod scratched himself up again – yes, AGAIN – so Le Cône was put straight back on once more. 

    Now, you’d think there were only limited gaddings-about to be had by a Côned cat. However, we know the full story from when Catorze was supposed to be Côned for a few days during lockdown but, because he wouldn’t stop scratching at his wounds, it ended up being a few months. If you let the little sods out whilst Côned (as we did), astonishingly, the reduced peripheral vision doesn’t hold them back. They still do the same moronic things that they did sans Cône, and probably a few more that didn’t occur to us. 

    And, if said moronic things are in public and in broad daylight, Le Cône makes it a little more difficult to say, “It must have been some other black cat”. (We still tried it. I don’t think our neighbours believed us.)

    Here is just a taste of what Rodan got up to, egged on by his sister Mothra: 

    A sunset wander.
    Mothra and Rodan do not live in either of these houses.
    This was sent to my sister by one of her neighbours.

    As the saying goes, “You can put a Chat Noir in a Cône, but you can’t make him behave.”

    *UPDATE: Rodan is now sans Cône, having miraculously stopped scratching during a brief Cône-free trial. How long will he last this time? 

    For more Catorzian capers, please visit http://louiscatorze.com

  • L’intelligence artificielle ne fait pas de poids à la stupidité naturelle

    With which public figure do you disagree the most?

    Much as it pains me to claim that I know better than an eminent scientist, I don’t share Stephen Hawking’s view that Artificial Intelligence could pose a threat to us.

    Not long ago, when we were watching television, Louis Catorze stepped on the smart remote’s microphone and whined. Not a full-on scream, but his awful, plaintive, dying dog whine, which is actually a lot worse.

    The TV replied, “Sorry, can you say that again?”

    Six seconds ago, the front paws were on top of it.

    That tells us all that we need to know, doesn’t it?

    There is no way that any entity or force stupid enough to request a second Catorzian whine (trust me, even one is too many), would also be clever enough to take over the world. 

    Mesdames et Messieurs, humanity is safe. As you were. 

    Nothing artificial here. Not much intelligence, either.

    For more Catorzian capers, please visit http://louiscatorze.com

  • D’où venait-il? Que signifiait-il? Où l’appréhender?

    What was the last live performance you saw?

    It’s funny you should ask, WordPress, because it took place just last night. And what a performance it was. 

    In the same way that nature abhors a vacuum, Louis Catorze cannot abide a closed door.

    Cat Daddy had an online meeting yesterday evening, with a local business for whom he is on the Board of Trustees. He shut himself in the living room in order to conduct this meeting which, naturellement, triggered Catorze’s Urge To Mess Things Up switch. The little sod appeared from wherever he was in the garden, stationed himself outside the closed door and screamed and screamed. 

    I was trying to watch the football and make madeleines as a farewell gift for my Year 11 students, whose last French lesson is today. I wasn’t really concentrating on what Catorze was doing … until it suddenly dawned on me that he had been screaming non-stop for twenty minutes. 

    I wondered if, perhaps, he was thirsty, so I let him into the front room. Within seconds, the door opened again and an angry hand flicked him back out again. Cat Daddy told me later that Catorze hadn’t even approached his water; instead, he had just circled the coffee table, screaming bloody murder, then jumped onto his lap to scream some more, into the camera.

    None of the meeting attendees said a word about it, and all continued as if nothing had happened.

    After a further few minutes, Catorze came to the kitchen to have a snack. I had hoped he’d tired of his screaming but, no, the snack was just to fuel himself for more. Then back he went, and the screaming resumed. 

    There wasn’t much I could do about this. Because our ground floor is quite open plan, there was nowhere that I could detain Catorze (unless I put him in the dining room, which was too high-risk with fragile glassware, containers of kombucha brewing, and so on). Plus surely not even he would have the energy or the inclination to scream all the way through until the end of the call? 

    He did. And, once the call was over, he no longer wanted to go into that room. 

    Here is just a small taste of what we had to endure that evening, for THIRTY MINUTES: 

    Cat Daddy, much later: “Louis, you were an absolute disgrace.”

    Catorze: “Mwah!”

    For more Catorzian capers, please visit http://louiscatorze.com

  • Un nouveau mode de vie (Partie 5)

    My Catorzian thyroid-medicating skills have improved. And by “improved” I mean I’m about 0.03% less shit than I was when I did the first one. 

    Applying ear gel to a cat who doesn’t want ear gel is no mean feat, nor is it the kind of thing you can just do when the moment takes you. You have to lay out all the required apparatus ahead of time, but silently, without the cat noticing; if you go arsing about conspicuously in cupboards or drawers when the cat is within eye- and earshot, the little sod will know that something is afoot and will absent themselves as a precaution. 

    One of the best pieces of advice I received – thank you, Janet, if you’re reading this – was to only put on one finger of the glove, leaving the rest of it kind of scrunched up in your hand. This means that the cat is less likely to know what’s coming, on account of the glove being mostly concealed. I find that it works best to apply the gel to the gloved finger, then Act Normal and pretend to be engrossed in random other stuff before pouncing. This has yielded more success than grabbing and holding Catorze and making an “event” of it. A drive-by gangland shooting rather than a state-endorsed guillotining, if you will. 

    I can’t believe that this is the new normal for us. But, as ever, we Cat People smile and accept or unquestioningly, like the suckers that we are. 

    Must Act Normal … must Act Normal.

    For more Catorzian capers, please visit http://louiscatorze.com

  • La Quinceañera del Rey Sol (Parte 2) 

    It’s Bank Holiday Monday, and we are still basking in the afterglow of Louis Catorze’s Quinceañera (which Cat Daddy keeps pronouncing as “quince-a-rama”, like Bananarama but with, erm, a quince instead of a banana). 

    The dress code was, “Cats messing stuff up”. I think I nailed it.

    The final guest list was as follows:

    • The Dog Family 
    • Cocoa the babysit cat and his sister Chanel’s folks 
    • Family Next door 
    • That Neighbour* and his wife
    • Blue the Smoke Bengal’s mamma 

    *That Neighbour is so called because he is always the one who ends up escorting Catorze home after he escapes out at The Front and goes on the rampage. When telling the story I always finish with, “And guess who it was that brought him home?” And the person listening says, “Oh no, not that neighbour again?”

    There was food (nachos with refried bean and tomato salsa dips, chicken enchiladas with salad and guacamole, lime and salted pretzel baked cheesecake and a Spanish cheese board) and drink aplenty, an outdoor mood board of some of our favourite Catorzian moments, Latin American music and general merriment, from 2:30pm until past 9pm. 

    Me: “We could call them meowgaritas!” Cat Daddy, without looking up from his phone: “No.”

    Catorze’s guests even brought him birthday cards: 

    The one on the far right is a BESPOKE DESIGN.

    Throughout it all, the birthday boy cordially greeted his guests, let the kids cuddle him, but mainly observed the proceedings from the other end of the garden, as if the whole thing were a bit too downmarket for him. He did, however, make sure that his late afternoon visite aux toilettes was timed perfectly to coincide with the serving of our main course. Yes, someone took a picture. No, I won’t be publishing it here. 

    We were too busy having fun to take many photos, but here are a couple from the day. We are so grateful to everyone who came although, now, we need to think about if and how we should go bigger and better for Catorze’s Sweet Sixteen next year …

    The full display.
    Catorze: “The hell is this mess?”
    Gazing at his favourite human.

    For more Catorzian capers, please visit http://louiscatorze.com

  • Tu as un ami en moi 

    Thank you so much to everyone who sent birthday wishes to Louis Catorze, and special thanks to whoever sent him this, which he loved:

    I did allow him a bit of this as it’s a cat treat, not human food.

    The little sod had a splendid time out all night, then waking me up at 5am, just for fun. His Quinceañera will take place tomorrow, and I will update you next week on how that went.

    Remember those glorious days when Catorze would come to bed with me, and we would lie together in the light of my red lamp? Ah, what lovely memories. And, sadly, that’s all they are, because he doesn’t do it anymore. 

    Mesdames et Messieurs, please reset your watches because Catorzian Summer Time (CST) is officially here, and this means that the little sod is permanently out. We never see him. In fact, he doesn’t even attend Boys’ Club anymore, much to Cat Daddy’s relief disappointment. 

    And either the Beltane trickster gods are playing some sort of joke on us, or Armageddon is nigh: Louis Catorze and Blue the Smoke Bengal appear to have reached some kind of truce:

    Well, well, well.

    Relations between the two have always been somewhat mixed, with Blue being perfectly cordial and friendly and Catorze being the miserable shit who didn’t want to give him a chance. Catorze let the side down in spectacular fashion on this occasion, with the whole street watching. 

    However, perhaps Catorze’s icy heart is melting in his old age as, today, he was more than happy to welcome his friend. It was nice of Blue to pop round and say hello, although I happen know that his mamma was away for the day so he was probably just bored. 

    The rendez-vous didn’t last long, with Blue preferring to gaze over the fence into the Zone Libre than to interact with Catorze. But it’s good news that they are, at least, coexisting happily.

    I wonder if Blue will come to tomorrow’s Quinceañera?

    Too busy hanging out with friends to come and see us.

    For more Catorzian capers, please visit http://louiscatorze.com

  • Je ne suis pas un psychopathe; je suis un sociopathe de haut niveau


    Do you have a quote by which you live your life, or of which you often think?


    (Sorry, WordPress, but the original wording bothered me.) 

    Being pagans at heart, Cat Daddy and I rather like the Wiccan saying, “If you do no harm, do what you will”. 

    Louis Catorze lives his life by the second part of the saying, i.e. just doing whatever the heck he wants. That’s not to say he SEEKS to do harm but, rather, that he is unconcerned about whether or not harm happens as a result of his actions. A sociopath rather than a psychopath, if you will. 

    (That’s correct, isn’t it? A psychopath intends to hurt others, whereas a sociopath merely doesn’t care about whether they do or they don’t? That said, both are pretty shit. Given the choice we wouldn’t really want to live with either one, and yet here we are.)

    Here is one of my favourite photos of Catorze, which truly sums up his “Do what you will” attitude: 

    Loving himself.

    His second-favourite motto, incidentally, is an adaptation of Murphy’s Law, “If it can go wrong, it will … and, if it doesn’t, I’ll give it a helping hand”. And clearly Le whole Blog is a testament to that. 

    For more Catorzian capers, please visit http://louiscatorze.com

  • La Quinceañera del Rey Sol

    Louis Catorze is fifteen today, putting him in the unglamorous yet hilarious “Geriatric” category:

    Some sources call it “Super Senior”, but “Geriatric” is much funnier.

    I was a little sad when I read that treating his hyperthyroidism would buy him another three to five years, because that really didn’t sound like much time. Then I remembered that he’s fifteen now so, in actual fact, that gives him a very long lifespan indeed. And, since he’s part-alien in origin, it wouldn’t surprise me if he even exceeded that.

    Because it’s not often that a sickly scrap of a thing like Catorze turns fifteen, Cat Daddy and I will be celebrating this occasion belatedly, at the weekend, with, erm, a Quinceañera party. (We’re going for a Latin American theme, gracias for asking). It’s turning into quite a thing with the guest list currently at fourteen, although some haven’t yet confirmed attendance (I imagine because they think we’re joking).

    Sadly Catorze is not allowed jambon de Bayonne or jamón ibérico, but we are making up for this in cuddles. I think he’d rather have had the jambon/jamón, but never mind.

    Happy birthday, little sod. Let’s get your party preparations under way!

    Those are were my clean clothes.

    For more Catorzian capers, please visit http://louiscatorze.com

  • Un nouveau mode de vie (Partie 4)

    When considering treatments for Louis Catorze’s hyperthyroidism, we were offered the options of a pill, an oral liquid or a topical gel. I went for the gel on the grounds that at least Catorze wouldn’t be able spit it back at me, nor would he find inventive ways of pretending he’s ingested it when he hadn’t. 

    Astonishingly, despite being thicker than a concrete milkshake, Catorze is the master of making medication disappear when he doesn’t want to take it. When he was on Gabapentin years ago, for feline hyperesthesia, he went through a phase of fake-swallowing the pill, initiating a fake cuddle, then silently spitting the pill over my shoulder. I found one stuck in my hair one day, and realised not only the little sod’s deception, but also the fact that I had been inadvertently transporting spat-out pills via my hair to all manner of places, thus preventing the big pilly pile-up which would have alerted me to the problem. 

    Then there was this incident. I turned that room over like CSI and I still don’t understand how this happened. 

    The gel has to be applied twice a day, with gloves. Cat Daddy and I have agreed that, since I am a lark and he is a nightingale, I will do the morning application and he the evening one. We even created the ingenious, poetic slogan of “Right at night” (I know – Shakespeare would be so proud of us) so that we he wouldn’t end up doing the same ear twice. It means that, regretfully, I am tasked with doing the harder-to-access left ear, but tant pis. 

    Cat Daddy: “He’ll be fine with it. He loves having his ears played with.”

    Me: “No, he doesn’t.”

    Him: “He does! Look!”

    [He sticks his finger in Catorze’s ear. Catorze rolls and purrs.]

    Cat Daddy: “Now you try it.”

    [I gently brush Catorze’s ear with my little finger. Catorze flinches and scowls.]

    Oh dear. 

    Anyway, we are a couple of weeks in, and it’s really not fun. Catorze doesn’t attack us, but he wriggles, kicks and generally makes the process harder than it needs to be. My first morning dosage didn’t go very well at all. And Cat Daddy’s first night dosage was even worse, although I swear that the reason it turned to shite was because he stuck the wrong finger in Catorze’s ear*. 

    *Cat Daddy insists that he didn’t, but then this is the man who once tried to stick his middle finger up at me but stuck his index finger up by mistake. After correcting himself, he remarked that holding one’s middle finger aloft didn’t feel like a natural, easy movement, and he asked how I managed to do it with such dexterity and aplomb. Erm, regular practice, Cat Daddy. It’s called muscle memory.

    Anyway, this is our new forever. (Cat Daddy: “Or until HE goes.”) I guess we just have to get used to it. 

    Enjoying some Cat Daddy love.

    For more Catorzian capers, please visit http://louiscatorze.com

  • Un nouveau mode de vie (Partie 3)

    If you’ve ever had to change the food of a fussy cat, don’t follow the usual advice, which is to phase it in gradually. If it’s mixed with something that they already like, of COURSE they’ll eat it, in the same way that I’d probably eat razor blades and asbestos if they were covered in cheese. But when the balance tips in the favour of the new food, then the bastard cats will change their minds, just as I would if there were more razor blades and asbestos than cheese.

    Don’t ask us how we know this. 

    Fussy cats need something that they like enough to eat on its own and, merci à Dieu, when we served Louis Catorze with his new Orijen Original Cat, he was happy to tuck in. After putting away four servings back to back, with his bowl licked clean, not a scrap remaining (so maybe the pieces are softer on his creaky old fangs than Orijen Six Fish?), he went out to harass the local wildlife. 

    Then, when Catorze came back in, he had a further serving. He tried his luck for a sixth, too, but by that time his belly looked disconcertingly round, and Cat Daddy was scared that he would puke it all up, choke and then slip into a coma. So we left it at five. 

    (Incidentally, I’m not advocating serving a cat with as many servings as they want. This is a cat who has lost too much weight, and we are desperate to fatten him up.)

    I’m grateful that Catorze hasn’t turned this into an ongoing food war. Let’s hope that he will be as accommodating when it comes to his medication. 

    Good boy for eating your new food.

    For more Catorzian capers, please visit http://louiscatorze.com

  • Où la guêpe a passé, le moucheron demeure

    After joking about hornets’ nests in a previous blog post, I am astounded to report that we may actually have one. 

    Wasps keep randomly appearing in the house, usually in the same room and without any window having been open. I trapped a few and released them, thinking they were my friend’s friendly, do-gooder honey bees who had come to bid me Beltane blessings. They’re not. They’re wasps, the naughty guys who attack you for your fruit juice and your ice cream. 

    There are many reasons for which I would not want a wasps’ nest in the house, but the main one is that Louis Catorze cannot be trusted. Chasing bugs is one of his favourite things to do. He may well only have the attention span of a gnat but, when it comes to chasing bugs, he will inexplicably dedicate hours to the cause.

    Surprisingly, he is often successful. I’ve seen him swatting a fly in mid-air and then chomping it down whole before it even hit the ground. We absolutely do not want him to try this kind of shit with a wasp. 

    An action shot with a fly.

    Our challenge now is to find out for sure where the impingers are coming from. And we need to do it before Catorze does. Wish us luck. 

    For more Catorzian capers, please visit http://louiscatorze.com

  • Un nouveau mode de vie (Partie 2) 

    Normally, at this point in the year, I would be ordering one portion of jambon de Bayonne from Ocado for Louis Catorze’s birthday, another from the Natoora deli in Chiswick as a back-up, and some jamón ibérico from Waitrose, just in case.

    However, because the little sod has just been diagnosed with hyperthyroidism, it’s a hard NON to any foods intended for humans. 

    This attack on my strawberries and ricotta was filmed before the diagnosis. There’ll be no more of this under the New Regime.

    I know that a piece the size of my fingernail probably wouldn’t make him keel over and die, but he’d only scream for more and we’d end up giving in, especially after a couple of Screaming Roi cocktails. So it’s all or nothing. Well, not so much of the “all”. Just the “nothing”. 

    Too much iodine is, apparently, bad news for Catorze, so it’s adieu to the fish skins that he used to love. The good people at Orijen have advised me of the iodine levels of their different variants, and Six Fish has the second-highest. (Cat Daddy: “We’ve been feeding him dangerous food for years!”) So we’ve made the decision to swap to Original Cat, which is rated the second-lowest. 

    Here’s a dull chart for anyone who’s interested, going from lowest to highest in iodine:

    1. Orijen Fit & Trim Cat: 2.10 mg/kg iodine as fed. (Why give a too-skinny cat food designed for too-fat cats, right?)
    2. Orijen Original Cat: 2.20 mg/kg iodine as fed.
    3. Orijen Guardian 8: 2.56 mg/kg iodine as fed.
    4. Orijen Kitten: 2.57 mg/kg iodine as fed.
    5. Orijen Regional Red: 2.99mg/kg iodine as fed.
    6. Orijen Six Fish: 3.38mg/kg iodine as fed.
    7. Orijen Tundra: 4.00 mg/kg iodine as fed. (This is the most expensive of the lot, so Cat Daddy rejoiced when he heard that it wasn’t a viable contender.)

    (No idea what “as fed” means. I’m guessing it just means served from the pack as it is, as opposed to drizzled with squid ink and nori flakes?)

    So … not quite the Catorzian birthday planning that I’d anticipated. But if we stick to The Rules, hopefully he will have more birthdays. 

    He may be ill, but he’s still a massive bastard.

    For more Catorzian capers, please visit http://louiscatorze.com

  • Clouer ses couleurs au mât

    We have a Code Bleu situation here. Well, not HERE, but in CR4, the manor of Boots, usurper stepbrother of Antoine, Louis Catorze’s frère-from-another-mère. 

    Don’t mess with Boots.

    Remember Boots and his penchant for losing his Chelsea collars? Well, he is now down to his last one, but we can’t buy him any more because the Chelsea Megastore is out of stock. They don’t even have an “Email me when back in stock” option. I suppose we could contact the club to ask but, let’s face it, nobody wants additional contact with Chelsea if they can possibly avoid it. 

    Smart boy.
    “Out of stock” AND “almost gone”? Surely it’s one or the other?

    Now, we could, of course, just wait for the stock to replenish, but we have no way of knowing whether this might be days, weeks or months. In the meantime, the likelihood is that Boots will lose his solitary remaining Chelsea collar and end up collarless.

    This absolutely cannot be, because the bell on his collar serves as a valuable alert to Antoine. Antoine really needs to know that his usurper stepbrother is at large, because Boots can be a bit mean to him. 

    The obvious thing would be to put him in some sort of interim collar, but here are the issues that we face: 

    1. It absolutely must be a football collar. (Don’t ask why. It just does.)
    2. The featured football team ought to have nasty, thuggish fans; a jolly, community-based club just isn’t very Boots. 

    The other problem, of course, is that many football clubs sell dog collars, but there are very few cat ones available. That said, Boots is such a meaty chonkosaurus that a collar for a small dog could work. 

    After some searching, we discovered a limited collection of horrible-team cat collars.

    *Not an awful club, but local to Boots.

    **Covers all bases, being the common denominator between all horrible clubs.

    Please vote for your favourite or for the funniest, whichever you feel is more appropriate.

    No collar for Catorze on account of, erm, even newborn kitten-sized ones being too small.

    For more Catorzian capers, please visit http://louiscatorze.com

  • Je suis la Roux-surrection

    Nine Easters ago, distant enough not to be an everyday thought but still memorable enough for us to be furious when we think about it, Louis Catorze disappeared. He wasn’t gone for long and, these days, we know to leave it a good three days before worrying. But we understand that sinking feeling when you realise you’ve not seen your pet for a while, and that this isn’t typical behaviour. 

    On Good Friday morning, Catorze’s cat-cousin Roux vanished. Because their cat flap is digitally monitored, the frantic family were able to pinpoint exactly when Roux left the house, and they knew with 100% certainty that she had not been back since. They deployed the usual measures of looking in both logical and illogical places, placing cat litter outside for the smell to guide Roux home, making social media announcements, asking neighbours to check their sheds, and so on, to no avail. 

    The little sod finally reappeared on Easter Monday morning. It transpired that she had popped next door to visit her friend Idris, aka The Cat With The Human Face, and never left his house.

    You know when witches turn humans into cats? Yeah, that’s what Idris looks like.

    Maison Idris was my sister’s first port of call when they went searching, and she asked Idris’s humans to check their shed, which they did. She didn’t mention checking their house, nor did it even occur to her/them to do so, as everyone assumed that Roux would draw attention to herself if trapped there. It is also somewhat surprising that neither Idris NOR HIS TWO CANINE SIBLINGS bothered to sound the “Intruder Alert” klaxon in any way, despite the whole lot of them supposedly being so psychic that, in horror films, their reaction tells us if someone is possessed.

    That said, Catorze would probably be just as inefficient in the same situation. A fly in the house: alarms and strobe lighting, day and night. Another cat in the house: whatever.

    Just like a stealthy phrogger, Roux lived silently and invisibly in Maison Idris, alongside the humans and the animals, for three days. She finally made herself known at 1am on the day of her release, scaring the shit out of Idris’s family, who went to investigate the noise in the attic because thought they were being robbed. When they discovered that it was Roux, they provided her with food, water and litter and kept her under room arrest until her family were able to collect her later that morning.

    Anyway, Roux is now safely home, although Idris seems to be missing the company because he’s followed her:

    Idris wants to hold onto that long weekend feeling.

    If your cat is capable of this level of bastardliness – and they all have it in them, even if they don’t show it – in the event of them going missing, please ask neighbours to check their HOMES as well as sheds and garages. Yes, even if they have other pets. Clearly we can’t rely on the resident pets to do their job and speak up, because they are all either in cahoots together or just plain useless.

    The worst Easter weekend ever.

    For more Catorzian capers, please visit http://louiscatorze.com