Louis Catorze welcomed a friend during the bank holiday weekend. Well, when I say “welcomed”, I don’t really mean that. In fact, “friend” may be something of a stretch, too.
If you are a long-term follower of Le Blog, you will know that relations between Catorze and Oscar the dog next door were, erm, somewhat mixed*. Catorze seemed genuinely curious about his canine neighbour and came in peace, whereas Oscar just wanted to kill him. And, the more Catorze refused to take no for an answer, the more murderous Oscar became. You get the idea.
*Non-Brits: if your British friends ever describe any experience as “mixed”, it means it was only narrowly short of an apocalypse.
Disco the dog, however, is a different case entirely: he’s younger, friendlier and more patient than his big brother Oscar. And, most importantly, the sight of cat doesn’t trigger his Urge To Kill switch. So, after some years of debating about introducing the pair, and after too much booze for most of us at the pub, last weekend we and the Dog Family hit upon the genius idea of finally making it happen.
Dog Daddy, after arriving at Le Château: “To make this work, we all need to just act normal.”
(He and Cat Daddy then proceeded to drink three bottles of red wine between them, so they nailed that particular objective.)
In short: apart from one hissing incident (when Disco, in his keenness to say hello, bounced a bit too close to Catorze) and a lot of Catorzian screaming, the two parties behaved themselves. Catorze was offended, cautious maybe, but not particularly fearful. It helped considerably that one of us remained sober enough to veto the stupid suggestions. (“Why don’t we let the dog off the lead?” Erm, no.) Conducting the experiment with all four of us drunk would not have been a good idea.
The male humans, however, were far less civilised than the animals, with the copious amounts of red wine sending them spiralling into Unrepeatable Expletives and inappropriate conversation. I hope that none of our neighbours were home.
Anyway, Sa Maj now has his Château back to himself, and he appears to have forgotten all about what happened. Let’s hope he isn’t saving up a massive revenge -puke in some inappropriate place, at some inappropriate time …