louiscatorze.com

KramPuss, le diable d’hiver

18/12/2016

One of our much-loved blog followers very kindly sent Louis Catorze a soft collar as a get-well gift. Thank you, Tally! What a thoroughly sweet and and thoughtful gesture, for a spoilt little sod that probably doesn’t deserve it. The collar has been a godsend in terms of allowing him to get comfortable and sleep properly, but the naughty boy has found all sorts of ways of exploiting its, erm, versatility.

On Friday, when we came home from a meal out, he had shoved one arm through it and was wearing it as a sort of off-the-shoulder top/cape, and the next day it was a 50s-style prom skirt. Unfortunately he cannot be trusted without a collar properly in place, and doesn’t even last a second without going for his tail again. So, with deep regret, I decided to put his plastic collar back on again, reserving his soft collar for supervised sleep sessions only.

Could I get it back on? Mais non.

To be fair, Louis Catorze wasn’t THAT uncooperative, although he did yowl and complain all the way through. I was just too stupid to figure out the weird fastenings; after I had finished, there were rough seams rubbing against his ears and bits of plastic sticking up in all directions. So back to the vet I went.

Because both Cat Daddy and Houseguest Matt were out, I had to take Louis Catorze myself. He fought like an absolute fiend as I put him into his box, and continued to struggle and writhe throughout the car journey and as I carried him across the car park. The two ladies in the vet’s waiting room (with their nice, calm cats) looked quite alarmed as I fell through the door, breathless and sweating, hair stuck to my face, just about managing to cling onto a violently-shuddering cat box.

As I waited, with the box continuing to spasm and jerk at my feet and the ladies trying/pretending not to notice, I sent an SOS to Cat Daddy. His helpful reply: “I don’t understand. He’s always fine when I take him to the vet.” Right. Thanks.

The vet showed me how to put the collar on properly, and we’re booked in again on the 22nd so that she can check his tail. This nicely messes up our holiday plans … but, having looked back at my blog entries from this time last year, it seems that that’s Le Roi and that’s what he does.
Le Cône est de retour

16/12/2016

We have had a stressful few days at Le Château.

The mascara worked like a dream when freshly applied but, when it wore off, we were back to square one again. And, when I came home on Wednesday night, the tail-chasing and throaty yowling were worse than ever, at which point I discovered that Louis Catorze had gnawed the crap out of his tail.

I called the out-of-hours vet, who told me to give him some Metacam and make an appointment for the next day. So Cat Daddy cancelled his morning’s meetings and took him in.

It turns out he had a minor tail injury which was concealed by his fur, and that’s what was troubling him. Unfortunately all his biting has both worsened this AND given him a new injury on a different part of his tail that was fine before.

Obviously this isn’t great, but it certainly beats the previous theories that he might have had a mental disorder (how exactly does one treat such a thing?) or that we were too boring (again, I have no idea how to fix this; 44 years on the planet and I’m not about to suddenly become fun now).

Despite being walloped with the quadruple whammy of antibiotics, painkillers, a shaved tail and Le dreaded Cône, Le Roi is reasonably content and comfortable now and, more importantly, he can no longer bite his tail. And, because he can’t use the cat flap whilst wearing Le Cône, I had the surreal experience of sleeping in the kitchen with him last night, so that I could let him in and out, and throughout the night I had the privilege of constant cuddles. (Cat Daddy had shut the bedroom door and Houseguest Matt was out, but still: CUDDLES! FOR ME!)

Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to send messages of support.
Le maquilleur royal

13/12/2016

Houseguest Matt came good with the toxin-free mascara.

And it seems that any old plebby mascara simply wouldn’t do for his cher ami: he spent quite some time in the beauty section of the organic shop trying various brands to find one with the perfect consistency. And, when a curious sales assistant passed by to see if he needed help, he told them, “It’s for a cat.”

“Well, I had to say something,” he later said, “otherwise they would have thought it were for me.”

Right. What a relief to know he saved himself THAT embarrassment.

Anyway … as well as buying the mascara, Houseguest Matt was also kind enough to offer to do the deed, which was a tremendous relief. I warned him of Louis Catorze’s tendency to kick and struggle like a psycho in situations such as these, but he insisted that he was tough enough for the task … and I was left looking really stupid when the little shit purred and rolled for Houseguest Matt and even went to him for cuddles afterwards. (In the last picture you can even see a bit of mascara still on his finger.)

Whether this succeeds in assuaging the tail-chasing is yet to be seen. But it seems that Louis Catorze’s soulmate count has increased by 100%. And, with TWO people in the house who are more adept than I at applying substances to la personne royale, this means I am officially exempt from this horror forever more.
Le maquillage du Roi

12/12/2016

Following a few more instances of Louis Catorze thundering through Le Château chasing his tail (and knocking Houseguest Matt’s stuff off his bedside table at 3am – ha), I’ve spent most of the weekend Googling coloured dye for pets. I wish I were joking.

Most of the results of my fact-finding odyssey have been warnings not to dye your pet, and I can’t say I’m surprised; until now I’d have thought it a thoroughly idiotic thing to do. And, had anyone tried to convince me that they needed to do it for medical reasons, I would have kidnapped their pet for its own safety and reported them to animal welfare.

Yet, here I am, declaring to the world that I need to do this to stop my cat from eating himself. Oh dear.

And, should you choose to ignore the warnings and dye your pet regardless, there are a million stipulations to which Louis Catorze would never agree. (Example: “For best results, start with a freshly washed animal.” Non, merci.)

After receiving the vet’s confirmation this morning that a non-toxic dye might be worth a go, and after a good friend and ardent Roi supporter came up with the genius idea of using plant-based, hypo-allergenic mascara, I thought we might have hit upon a cure. Something toxin-free and designed to be splodged around your eyes couldn’t possibly do him any harm, right? Even Cat Daddy is up for this. And, better yet, I already have an organic mascara.

Or, I thought I had. Naturellement, I have no idea where it is, and I fear it might have been lost in the move to Le Château. (I don’t wear mascara often, clearly.) We don’t want to waste time hunting fruitlessly, nor wait for delivery of a new one, nor do we have time during a horrible working week to go out shopping for one.

Merci à Dieu, then, for Houseguest Matt. There aren’t many people who would unflinchingly accept a request of, “Would you mind popping out today and buying an organic black mascara to paint the cat’s tail?”

I’m tempted to ask him to do the painting, too. Is that going too far?

(Le Roi is pictured below on Houseguest Matt’s legs.)
Le locataire du Château

10/12/2016

Cat Daddy and I have a guest staying with us at Le Château. Now, for most cats, a big deal such as a new housemate would need to be brokered with expert skill and precision; however, because this is Louis Catorze, and because our guest is male, we had a feeling everything would work out fine.

Mind you, I wasn’t prepared for Louis Catorze to love Houseguest Matt more than he loves me, nor for Houseguest Matt to be quite so smug about it.

This is how things have gone so far:

– Seconds after Houseguest Matt’s arrival: Catorze runs to welcome him
– Day 1: snuggly selfies on Houseguest Matt’s bed
– Day 6: Catorze steps over my lap to get to Houseguest Matt’s
– Day 7: Catorze starts sleeping on Houseguest Matt’s bed at night instead of ours [although Houseguest Matt has just read this over my shoulder and he informs me that, in actual fact, this began on Day 3]
– Day 11: The pair of them invent their own meowy language that only they understand
– Day 14: Houseguest Matt and I do that thing where you sit at opposite ends of the room and both call the cat’s name at the same time … and it doesn’t go well for me

I feel partly responsible for this as I should have stomped down on it after Day 1. But I was too laissez-faire, and now it’s probably too late.

And, far from feeling bad about stealing our cat, Houseguest Matt finds it hilarious. His standard response is: “He’s MY cat now! Mwahahahaha!”

The upside of all the treachery, of course, is the fact that we could do a lot worse than a guest who dotes on the little sod and looks after him better than we do; it certainly beats those who are neutral (as a couple have been) and those who take one look at him and run away, screaming (yup, this has happened, too). Le Roi has no idea how much he’s lucked out with Houseguest Matt … but, fortunately, we do.
Peins-la en noir

06/12/2016

Cat Daddy and I have spent a disturbing amount of time monitoring Louis Catorze to try and understand his tail-chasing habit. And, yes, this has been just as dull as it sounds, with the exception of the unsettling moment when he actually HISSED at his own tail.

The strange thing is that Catorze doesn’t appear to be going for his tail in response to anything physical. It seems that the SIGHT of the white bony bit – which stands out against his black fur – is what triggers him, perhaps because he thinks something is stuck to his tail, or because he thinks the white blob is a worm or a bug. And this is most odd as he’d surely have had to go for the tail a few times in the first place, in order to thin the fur and expose the white bony bit?

“Which do you think came first: the tail-chasing or the white bony bit?” I asked Cat Daddy.

“I don’t know,” he replied curtly, not even looking up from his laptop, “but I bet historians and scientists the world over are agonising over it.”

Sigh.

“It’s right up there with all the other ‘Which came first?’ debates: the chicken or the egg, life on earth or a habitable environment …” Cat Daddy’s voice trailed off, his eyes remaining down.

I thanked him for his insightful comment and bade him good day – although I couldn’t resist Googling both the chicken and the egg and the life on earth thing, as soon as I left the room.

The question now is: what do we do about it? Short of colouring the white bony bit with black marker pen – Cat Daddy’s idea, and he wasn’t joking – we can’t think of a single feasible solution.

Are there any historians or scientists out there? A little help, s’il vous plaît?
Tromper, jouer, trahir

03/12/2016

We are still reeling from the vet’s revelation that Louis Catorze has resorted to eating his own body parts because he’s so bored. Cat Daddy, in particular, has taken it quite badly.

“I don’t have a problem with being called boring,” he said, “but … too boring for him? FOR HIM? He’s the dullest cat ever! He does nothing! What does that make us?”

He has a point.

I attempted a play session this morning, as advised, but the little sod just sat with his arms/front legs folded, tail flicking away, and made zero effort to join in. And, in a creepy sort of way, I had the feeling he had the upper hand and that he was playing with me, not vice versa.

I went berserk with the feather on a stick, trying desperately to elicit some sort of reaction, and Louis Catorze just stared back as if to say, “Danse, mon petit singe, danse!” Then, after I gave up and discarded the toys, he went out to chase some leaves. Oui, Mesdames et Messieurs: EVEN DEAD LEAVES ARE MORE FUN THAN ME.

I don’t know where we go from here. M’aidez!
Nous sommes trop ennuyeux pour notre chat

01/12/2016

It seems I have written a new instruction manual on how to be the worst person on the face of the planet. It goes something like this:

1. If your cat chases his tail, laugh at him.
2. If he keeps doing it, laugh some more.
3. If he does it for several hours through the night, curse him for being such a shit.
4. Don’t bother to actually check his tail unless he bites it so hard that he yelps, at which point you may discover that he has eaten it down to the skin.
5. Make an appointment at the vet’s, then get home late due to an accident on the motorway and miss the appointment.

“Don’t worry,” said Cat Daddy. “I’m sure he still loves you as much as he did before. Mind you, that wasn’t really a lot, was it?”

Silence, tumbleweed, crickets.

Anyway, we finally made it to the vet this evening, and the good news is that she found no sign of injury. “He doesn’t seem to be in pain when I touch the tail,” she said. “He’s yelling a lot, but then he yells a lot when he comes here, anyway, doesn’t he?”

More silence, tumbleweed, crickets.

We were advised to keep an eye on Louis Catorze’s tail over the next few days. The vet then shocked the life out of us by telling us that, in the event of it not deteriorating physically, the tail-chasing was more likely to be boredom-related and that we were to give Catorze more stimulation.

This hit me and Cat Daddy like a punch in the guts. So … we are not interesting enough for Sa Majesté.

To make matters worse, I know that, when I attempt to play with him, he declines in favour of toys that he can use on his own. So it seems that Louis Catorze has been trying to tell us for some time that we’re dull, and now we have just paid £25 for the joy of being told the same thing again.

We’re too boring for our cat. What d’you think about that?
Le samedi soir est bien pour se battre

27/11/2016

Louis Catorze has decided that one nemesis isn’t enough and so, now, he has a second.

In addition to his well-documented war on Oscar the dog next door, relations with Kiki the bichon frisé* have somehow gone from non-existent to merde totale.

Kiki lives several doors down the street from us and Louis Catorze wouldn’t ordinarily have any contact whatsoever with her, were it not for the fact that he has started to bolt out of the front door whenever we open it. Last night he did this after dark, which meant that supervising him was impossible and therefore we had no option but to leave him and wait until he decided to come in. And, whilst he was out there, Kiki happened to be walking by and they had a huge altercation.

I opened the front door just in time to hear a voice say, “Come on, Kiki!” and to catch sight of this tiny white cloud of rage being dragged undignifiedly away. I had to hand it to her, though: she put up a darned good fight. And I don’t know what made her so mad with Catorze, but I suspect he asked for it.

Le Roi was startled enough to come pitter-pattering straight in after that. But the stubborn little sod refused to budge from the front door and sat firmly on the doormat, waiting to be released for Round 2.

Oh my.

I reported the incident to Cat Daddy and, when I told him the dog’s name, his eyes widened. “Ah, the Elton John dog!”

Excuse-moi?

“I’ve met that dog before, in the park,” he continued. “Her owners told me her name but I knew I’d forget, so I thought of Elton John to help me remember. But then, when I got home, I couldn’t remember why I’d picked Elton John to help me remember a small white dog, so I’ve just been calling her the Elton John dog.”

Right.

(If you were born in the 80s or later, ask your parents.)

So it seems we are now twice as unpopular as we were before, when Louis Catorze only had one nemesis.

The other problem arising from having two canine nemeses is that it doesn’t sound right to say “Oscar the dog” and “Kiki the bichon frisé”; one is generic and the other is more breed-specific. So now we’re going to have to call Oscar “Oscar the Yorkshire terrier”, which is double the number of syllables.

Le Roi is hard work. I shall say it again: it’s a good thing we love him.

*Picture posed by Max, and not actually by Kiki; somehow I didn’t quite feel up to knocking at Kiki’s door and saying, “Hello. Your dog hates my cat. Please may I have a photo?” Thank you to Max’s mamma Jill for letting me use this picture.
Le piège à souris

19/11/2016

Another day, another darned mouse, this time delivered to our bedroom, undead and twitching. But, fortunately for me, by the time I had gone to fetch a plastic bag and come back again, Le Bon Dieu had had the grace to take its poor soul to mouse heaven.

Because we had to dash straight out to the eye hospital for Cat Daddy’s painfully early appointment, I didn’t have a chance to dispose of La Pauvre Souris in the park bin across the road. I certainly wasn’t putting it in any of our household bins in case Catorze broke in and caused further havoc, so, on our way out, I just dumped it temporarily on the Roi-inaccessible doorstep at The Front, with the intention of getting rid of it as soon as we returned. We would only be gone for a couple of hours and nobody was due to visit us, so nothing could possibly go wrong. Or so we thought.

As we headed off to the hospital in the car, we caught sight of the postman walking into our street. Merde.

There was no time to return home and dispose of the plastic bag before the postman saw it, although Cat Daddy said it was highly unlikely that any postman would untie a plastic bag that was sitting on a doorstep and peer inside.

That was when I realised that I hadn’t tied it up.

We were at the hospital for quite a lot longer than expected and, whilst I should have been worrying about Cat Daddy, all I could think about was whether the postman would tell all our neighbours that we keep a dead mouse in a John Lewis bag sitting on our front doorstep. (Postmen are PERFECTLY placed to spread gossip, aren’t they, given that they go to every house in the neighbourhood and probably know everyone?)

Our only hope was that maybe we wouldn’t have any letters today, so perhaps the postman would have had no need to come to our door. When we got home, however, we found not only that we had had more post than ever before in our lives, but also that the wind had somehow blown the bag open and its grim contents could be seen from the street.

Then one of the neighbours, who was passing by, stopped for a chat on the doorstep, and Cat Daddy was forced to maintain cheerful conversation whilst, at the same time, striking a bizarre pose to obscure La Pauvre Souris with his foot. (He later reported that it was VERY difficult to get that fine balance of hiding the body without stepping on it and having it burst underfoot.)

Now … would you forgive this contrite face?
Le chat vit pour manger

14/11/2016

Someone appears to have stolen Louis Catorze – quite why anyone would do this is beyond me – and replaced him with a similar-looking changeling cat who actually likes food.

For the first time EVER, this morning he pulled the Second Breakfast trick on Cat Daddy, who fell for it completely. When I got home I was berated for “forgetting” to feed Catorze before going to work when I knew full well that I had done it, and it was then that the little sod was rumbled.

This has never happened before. Quite the opposite, in fact: Le Roi’s plate is usually never empty.

His big brother, Luther, was different. When it came to the Second Dinner trick, he would have beaten Leonardo di Caprio to that Best Actor Oscar, without a doubt; too often I would be scrabbling through bins, accompanied by the sound of Luther’s “I’m starving to death” song, counting the empty food cans to work out whether I’d fed him 20 minutes previously or whether I’d dreamt the whole episode. And he once did such a number on Cat Daddy that he said, in all seriousness, “Maybe we didn’t feed him after all. Maybe we just THINK we did.”

Luther’s pièce de résistance was this:

1. Luther refuses the food that Cat Daddy puts down
2. Cat Daddy puts down another variant on the same plate (the single action that proved to be his undoing)
3. Luther eats Variant 2
4. After Cat Daddy leaves for work, Luther also eats Variant 1
5. Cat Daddy returns home, sees the empty plate and assumes I must have thrown away the uneaten food

We have no idea how many times he did this. It could have been hundreds.

I can’t see Louis Catorze suddenly sprouting a brain and being as wily as his brother, but, to be honest, given that November is usually the month that his health hits the skids, we’re delighted that he’s eating firsts, never mind seconds.

And the lime scent is back with a vengeance, affirming Cat Daddy’s belief that it’s “just a healthy cat smell”. Again, it could be so much worse, so we’re just going to enjoy it.
La lune est le rêve du Roi Soleil

12/11/2016

Please, someone, save us from this psycho nutjob. (No, not the new President Elect, but Le Roi.)

For the past few days he has been screaming, racing around the house, attacking us as we sleep and generally driving us round the bend. I can only assume this is due to the approaching full moon, because he was relatively normal* before.

*”Normal” refers to the Roi scale, not to most people’s reasonable interpretation of the word.

Yesterday he threw all his efforts into pummelling what looked like a shiny black worm, biting it, flicking it around, holding it in his front paws and doing the bicycle kick with his back ones, and, of course, picking it up in his mouth and fleeing if anyone tried to intervene. I later discovered that it wasn’t a worm at all but the suspender attachment from a basque but, even so, that’s time I will never get back again.

We have also had two mice in the last few days and, because Cat Daddy is recovering from quite a severe eye operation, the rodent-catching mantle has been passed to me. There’s nothing more disconcerting than glimpsing a mouse as it runs into the bathroom whilst you are having a shower, hotly pursued by Louis Catorze, then hearing them trash the place whilst you remain powerless to step in until you have washed the shampoo out of your eyes.

Only 2 more days until this nonsense hits its zenith, then hopefully the purging energy of the waning moon will calm the little sod down.
Rendre l’Amérique à nouveau grande

08/11/2016

On this historic day, Louis Catorze is thinking of his American subjects. (Don’t ask me how but, yes, it is possible to be a U.S. citizen and also the subject of a French feline king.)

However, having studied the credentials of the two presidential candidates, he cannot help but find them lacking in certain areas, and feels that only one individual could take them on and do better.

Naturellement, that one individual is himself.

Here are Le Roi’s policies for his kitty comrades the world over:

Racial justice – vous shalt be nice to other cats of all colours, but especially to black ones
Trade – vous shalt be nice to humans provided there is something in it for vous
Workforce skills and job training – if vos humans do something undesirable, vous shalt vomit, urinate and defecate in the most inconvenient places possible, until they work out what their mistake is and correct it
Climate change – vous shalt snuggle vos humans when it turns cold outside, but treat them like utter merde at all other times
Health care – vous shalt be rushed immediately to the vet at the slightest sniff or lethargy, whereas vos humans shalt wait 10 days for a medical appointment even if their eyeballs are hanging out on visceral strings
Energy – vous shalt conserve as much as possible by doing nothing all day, then expend it by flinging votre self around at 3 o’clock in the morning like an exorcism gone wrong

Based on the above, even I’m starting to feel that America might be better off under Le Roi. Le Roi for president! Or, rather, given that his first constitutional change would be to make America a monarchy, Le Roi for roi!
Le sixième sens

04/11/2016

I am delighted to report that Louis Catorze only escaped once on Halloween night, and that we all survived (apart from the large mouse that he brought in and terrorised the next day). But, although it’s all over for another year, the scares continue in the form of his creepy kitty sixth sense, disproving our theory that it’s directly proportional to intelligence.

Despite not being the brightest star in the galaxy, he is able not only to differentiate his staff’s footsteps from others but also to anticipate our homecoming in advance. He peacefully sleeps through noises made by the neighbours, the postman and random passers-by. But the minute he hears his daddy – or, rather unnervingly, just BEFORE he hears his daddy – he races to the front door so fast that his stupid little feet can’t keep up with themselves, and he skids around on the slippy floorboards like Bambi on ice. Sometimes he goes skidding right past Cat Daddy as he opens the door and ends up outside on the doormat and, to teach him a lesson for being such such a weirdo, Cat Daddy shuts the door on him.

Don’t worry, we always let him in again. (Well, apart from the time we forgot about him, and he ended up out at The Front, unsupervised, on the rampage for an hour.) And, a few weeks ago, when Cat Daddy remembered to let him in, he was greeted by this sight:

He’s equally perceptive when it comes to my arrival; a few evenings ago I took a while to park the car because I reversed in at the wrong angle and messed it up. When I finally came indoors, Catorze was right at the door – and, apparently, he’d been meowing there for a good minute or two before Cat Daddy had even heard the car.

He’s a scary little freak – living with him is as if Halloween never ended – but we love him.