Oh. Mon. Dieu. We have a Code Argent situation here at Le Château: Cat Daddy got drunk the other night and put Louis Catorze’s Louis XIV antique silverware in the dishwasher, and now there is a mark on the fork. I had a feeling that one of us would do this sooner or later. And I had a feeling it would be him and not me.
Merde.
Cat Daddy: “Well, how was I supposed to know? It looks just the same as any other cutlery.” (It really doesn’t. We have a grand total of zero pieces of cutlery that look like this one.)
Now, should I continue to use the fork and hope that Catorze’s creepy kitty sixth sense doesn’t detect the imperfect silverware and cause him to reject any food tainted by it? Or should I … fix it? Is this a thing? How does one fix these things without use of a toxic liquid metal that would poison la personne royale?
Whilst we figure out what to do, Catorze is weighing up alternative food options:
There aren’t many things that can drag Louis Catorze’s lazy arse from his igloo, once he’s decided to stay put. However, Reflets de France tuna rillettes is/are (I’m still not sure which is correct; native Frenchies, is it a singular or a plural noun?) one of those precious few things.
After ignoring me for much of Monday, as if by magic he decided to be my friend when I sat down to eat some tuna rillettes on oatcakes. After much creepy staring, aggressive headbutting and general bullying and intimidation, I acquiesced and offered him a few morsels. He gleefully hoovered them down, unable to believe his luck, then settled on my lap, purring so hard that his ears shuddered.
Maybe ear-shuddering during hard purring is a known thing, but it’s not something I have observed before. It’s subtle but nonetheless present, and you can see it in the right ear:
Check out the shudder on those bald, piggy ears.
Sadly an unwanted side effect of this whole escapade is that, in his haste to eat his precious tuna rillettes, Catorze inadvertently shoved one piece with his snout through the gap between the floorboards. Even freshly-opened tuna rillettes smell(s?) like rotting corpses from hell, so I daren’t even think about what it/they might smell like in a week, a year or even longer.
I now have visions of the next occupant of this house, whoever they may be, taking up the floorboards expecting to find evidence of a gruesome murder. If only they knew that it is, in fact, evidence of the life of a greedy, selfish cat and a pathetic human who gave in.
He has the audacity to look at me as if I caused the smell under the floorboards.
Louis Catorze is now on a combination of Cool Cat Club wet food and dry Orijen. I wasn’t sure when he would be ready for dry food again after his surgery but, since he is well enough to hunt rodents and rip their heads off, he ought to be well enough to crunch a few biscuits.
The little sod is happy. But this is certainly more work as we now have to change his bowl every meal, as opposed to a few times a week (as was possible with dry food). It’s a good thing we have a never-ending supply of bowls, and we have managed to make some of his old ones more user-friendly by kind of piling them in a stack, then putting food in the uppermost one.
Despite eating well, Catorze doesn’t seem to be regaining the weight that he lost when his teeth were giving him trouble. So, earlier this week, Cat Daddy carted him off to his least favourite place in the world. He is back to his December weight of 3.17kg, so he’s gained a tiny amount (40g) since his dental surgery. However, I gave him a mammoth brushing when he returned home, and the extraneous fur (pictured below, with a 50p coin for scale) will amount to at least 40g, so he is probably back down to 3.13kg again.
My first attempt was sabotaged.Second attempt after hasty rearrangement: success! And this was just Round 1. More fur came off after this.I discovered by accident that the wonders of technology allow me to copy and share the fur alone, if I want to. Luckily I don’t want to.
The vet told us that, if he didn’t continue to gain weight, a blood test could be conducted, but I would really rather not go down that route because Catorze doesn’t behave for blood tests and would have to be sedated. Cat Daddy also asked about the bald patch, which is continuing to mutate and evolve and will probably be a fully-functioning ecosystem soon. Once again, the vet had no idea what it was and seemed unconcerned since it’s not bothering Catorze. So we will continue to monitor it although, at this rate, it will need its own Twitter account by the end of the week.
Catorze was back outside on Rodent Duty as soon as he returned, showing no indication of stress or trauma. It seems that Cat Daddy and I bear the brunt of all the worry so that Sa Maj won’t have to, although isn’t that what we all do? The little sods have brainwashed us well.
Remember the headless mouse that Louis Catorze left for his papa during their lads’ weekend? I have since discovered that Cat Daddy didn’t realise it was headless, despite being the one who disposed of it (?). It was only when I told him to zoom in on the photo he’d sent me at the time, that he realised.
Him: “So where’s the head?”
Where, indeed? The popular opinion is that Catorze ate it, but this would be the first time in his life that he’s ever done such a thing. He’s a mutilator, not an eater; think Buffalo Bill rather than Hannibal Lecter.
The other incongruous part of the story is that the mouse had a clump of Catorzian fur attached to one of its front paws (which Cat Daddy also didn’t notice until reviewing the photo). Is this the rodent equivalent of skin scrapings under the victim’s fingernails … or a creepy serial killer calling card, the way that The Night Stalker drew pentagrams or BTK wrote those weird poems?
In what we desperately hope is unrelated news, since Catorze decided that he does, after all, like wet food (is prey “wet food”?) after a lifetime of telling everyone that he didn’t, it seems that his 9,073 existing bowls will no longer do. He seems to have problems eating pieces of wet food from the edges, either because his snout is too fat get to them or because he is too thick to see that they’re there. Even the tilted bowl that I bought for him a couple of years ago seems problematic.
I have no idea what on earth prevents him from eating wet food from his bowls when he was perfectly able to eat dry food from the same bowls, but then nothing about him has ever made sense. Therefore, in many ways, this is no surprise.
So I bought another bowl. Yes, ANOTHER one. I had hoped to sneak it past Cat Daddy without him noticing but, as bad luck would have it, he was here when it arrived.
Him: “What’s in that parcel?”
Me: “Erm … promise you won’t be angry?”
Him: “It had better not be anything to do with cats.”
[Silence, tumbleweed, crickets.]
“Open mon cadeau, salope!”
Him: “So what is it, then?”
Me: “It’s a bowl for Louis.”
Him: “[Unrepeatable Expletives.]”
Me: “But he’s struggling to eat out of his existing bowls.”
Him: “HE HAS SO MANY BOWLS. What are we going to do with the others?”
Me: “Erm … ahem … we could use them for ourselves?”
Him: “[Unrepeatable Expletives of the Worst Kind.]”
Luckily the little sod loves this bowl. Because it’s raised, tilted and curved, it places less stress on his creaky old bones and no bits can get stuck anywhere. However, after one feed, he still likes all the bits scooped back together into a pile in the middle. (Lizzi, if you are reading this, this is your fault.) And he also likes the pieces of fish cut up small. It seems he is not able to eat widely-strewn food pieces, nor can he chew pieces larger than 0.6cm², yet he can catch mice and rip their heads off. I know.
It even has a crown on it!
So all is now well with the world. Or, at least, it will be until I buy more bowls.
We bought this bowl from the wonderful Katzenworld. If your cat would like one, have a look here.
Louis Catorze had his dental surgery on Tuesday. He came home that evening sporting some impressive bald patches on his arms, like a prison gang leader with not one but two tattoo sleeves. And, according to Cat Daddy, Catorze lived up to that in the waiting room at check-out time, by making a dog, who had been impeccably behaved up to that point, go absolutely ballistic. Catorze didn’t even make a sound; just being there was enough. The dog’s human was absolutely mortified, but Cat Daddy reassured her that we’d been there many times with many dogs, and that it really wasn’t their fault.
“Soit à table, soit au menu.”
In the end, just one – ONE – small incisor was removed. This is great news because it means that Catorze has been able to keep his famous fangs. But what a drama over one tooth. I spent vast swathes of time, which I will never be able to get back, cutting up his soft food into pieces so minuscule that a baby ant could have swallowed them, and I probably didn’t need to. In fact, now that I think of it, since he was able to hunt, he should have been perfectly capable of chewing a couple of pieces of fish.
The little sod is subdued, and eerily silent; he didn’t utter a sound on the way back from the veterinary practice, and he only managed one feeble wheeze when he arrived. And, despite the fact that Cat Daddy was the one who bundled him into a bag and left him at his least favourite place in the world, he has sat on his papa’s lap but refused to sit on mine. Still, he’s eating and drinking. In fact, now that we have identified his favourite of the Cool Cat Club foods*, we have brought forward our next shipment with a few extra packs of them.
*Catorze especially loves the cod and salmon trays, which have the texture of pâté and which can be guzzled down easily even with hurty and/or no teeth.
Cat Daddy and I had plans to visit my sister and her family this weekend, but we don’t want to leave Sa Maj with a chat-sitteur right after his surgery. So he is in for a double treat: I shall be going away on my own, whilst the gentlemen of the household remain here for a well-deserved, weekend-long Boys’ Club. I have even persuaded Cat Daddy to let Catorze join him in bed, something he usually hates “because it’s like being in bed with a rat” (?).
Thank you again for your good wishes. And, yes, I will be asking Cat Daddy how he knows what it feels like to be in bed with a rat.
Merci à Dieu et à tous ses anges! We have renewed our subscription to the Cool Cat Club, and our order has arrived:
“Finalement!”
We had a brief fallow period of a day and a half before its arrival, after Louis Catorze had finished the last pack in the taster hamper. I had nothing to give him on Monday morning, and Pets at Home didn’t open until 9am. I thought I could stand strong for those couple of hours but little sod was an absolute hell-beast, creepy-staring, screaming, demanding play, thrashing around in the plastics recycling and generally scaring me witless, so I had to hold him off with some Reflets de France tuna rillettes. Obviously, at £3.70 a pop, this was never going to be a permanent solution. But you, too, would do anything to make it stop if you were faced with this look:
Saint Jésus.
I think back to all those cartoons I used to watch as a child, when the pursued would throw a string of sausages at the pack of pursuing beasts to keep them at bay, and now I know that it wasn’t just a dramatic effect for entertainment.
Anyway, having been successfully tided over with a combination of tuna rillettes, dampened Orijen and the ONE grain-free, fish-only wet food I could lay my desperate hands on at Pets at Home (which, luckily, he ate), Catorze now has his first choice food, in the following variants:
⁃ Deluxe tuna with shrimp
⁃ Deluxe fish medley
⁃ Ocean fish
⁃ Cod and salmon pâté
The little sod has his mojo back. Let’s hope he will snap back from his dental procedure just as quickly.
What a lucky boy Louis Catorze is. When our friends at the Cool Cat Club* found out about his Orijen predicament, their CEO – a fellow Chat Noir by the name of Morris – instructed his human subordinates to send us a pescatarian hamper full of their delicious fish variants.
Oh. Mon. Dieu! Merci beaucoup!
On the day that the hamper arrived, poor Catorze was in an especially low mood, barely eating and spending much of the day sleeping. I must confess that, since he doesn’t like wet food, nor will he settle for any old food even if hungry/desperate, my expectations were low.
However, in a shock twist to this tale, the little sod actually ate an ocean fish pouch. Not only that but, as I was serving it, he screamed and screamed at me to hurry up.
I know. I’ll just give you a few seconds to absorb that unprecedented news.
That isn’t the end of it: the next morning, he ate half a cod and salmon pâté tray, again screaming impatiently because my serving speed was not up to the required standard. Cat Daddy gave him an accidental bonus tuna and shrimp can when he came home drunk at 1:30am (Cat Daddy came home drunk, I mean, not Catorze) and the report via WhatsApp was, “He’s polished off a whole tin of one of those foods since I got back. He loves it.”
He has now scoffed his way through all the wet food in the hamper.
I cannot describe what an incredible relief this is. Given that the little sod has, in the past, chosen to starve for reasons such as unsatisfactory** food, good food served in an unsatisfactory manner and good food served on an unsatisfactory plate, I was very concerned indeed about what would happen to him in the run-up to his dental surgery and during the recovery time afterwards. Now I don’t need to worry.
**His “unsatisfactory” is not like most people’s “unsatisfactory”. This is, after all, the cat who eats organic, aged Comté from the cheese deli but refuses Marks and Spencer Comté.
Catorze now has a full belly, so he is back to being an annoying shite again. No doubt Morris knew perfectly well that this would happen, and it’s all part of the Chats Noirs’ quest to wear us down so that they can overthrow us.
“Maurice! 3am tomorrow … you know what to do, mon pote.”
*If you would like to try out the Cool Cat Club, have a look here. Catorze highly recommends them for their top-notch food and amazing service. He follows a mainly pescatarian diet, but the Cool Cat Club caters for a wide variety of demands requirements.
It has been a week of food-related drama here at Le Château, caused by the males in the household.
Cat Daddy came home drunk the other night after going to the rugby, and he refused the pasta I was making on the basis that he was “not sober enough to appreciate it”. I stopped preparing it and put everything away, only to have him then say, “Where’s the pasta you promised me?” So I dragged the pasta paraphernalia out again, continued where I had left off and, three minutes before it was ready, Cat Daddy announced that he would rather have cheese on toast instead. At that point I lost patience with him and said, “I AM MAKING PASTA. YOU WILL EAT IT. AND YOU WILL SAY THANK YOU FOR IT.”
Meanwhile, Louis Catorze has been making a dreadful mess with his food again, and licking his lips excessively after eating. When I gave him a fresh serving of food last week, he ate about two pellets and creepy-stared at me. I then sprinkled some hot water onto his food, and he wolfed down the lot.
Merde.
If you weren’t around the last time this happened, it means that something is very likely to be wrong with his teeth.
And if you WERE around the last time this happened, you will know that Catorze only eats the watered food if it’s daisy-fresh. If it’s too cold, too dry, too damp, too stale or [insert other bizarre and/or unfathomable reason for rejecting top-notch, expensive food], he won’t eat it and, instead, creepy-stares for a new portion. I daren’t even think about how much we have thrown away because it hasn’t met his stratospherically high expectations. It’s been maddening for us but, as always, this hasn’t dented his spirit in the slightest; Catorze has still been well enough to annoy the absolute merde out of a (male, of course) visitor to Le Château who happens to be allergic to cats. Apparently the screaming and bullying were so bad that Cat Daddy was forced to apologise.
Le Roi is booked in for X-rays and (possibly) dental surgery the week after next. I know. I can’t believe we are back here again, either.
It’s the coldest night of the month so far and, naturellement, Louis Catorze has picked now to escape out at The Front.
It’s too cold for me to go out looking for him. In fact, it’s too cold even for me to stand at the door for a few minutes and call for him (not that he comes when he’s called). But the thing is that Laurence driving the Plum Van is due to arrive any minute. And, when Catorze and Ocado drivers meet, it’s never pretty.
This evening will end in one of the following ways:
1. Catorze will come in the next time I call him, forever remaining unaware of Laurence’s impending arrival (unlikely).
2. Catorze will sit quietly on the window sill, observe Laurence from afar and allow him to deliver in peace (not a chance in hell).
3. Laurence have to slalom* around a screaming cat whilst he delivers our groceries, before eventually scrambling to safety and screeching off in the Plum Van at top speed (BINGO).
*Yes, I know that slaloming usually involves weaving in and out of many stationary objects, not one moving one. But anyone who has ever met a cat will understand.
Anyway, the little sod is still out there – we don’t know exactly where – and the clock is ticking for Laurence. The only thing that could make this worse would be That Neighbour putting his bins out at the very moment that the carnage kicks off.
Cat Daddy and I went to the bulk store the other day to stock up on a few bits. The bulk store is one of my favourite places in the world but it’s very dangerous; it SOUNDS healthy and wholesome but, if you want to buy 934kg of sugary junk, you can. Nobody says anything or tries to stop you. Puppy Mamma and I once bought our weight in Turkish delights and chocolate-coated coconut things, then congratulated ourselves for being so earth-motherly and disciplined.
One of the things that I bought this time was a kilo of roasted macadamias, and part of the ritual of shopping at the bulk store is decanting our goods into jars when we get home. It’s messy but very satisfying. However, during the decanting process, I spilled macadamias all over the kitchen worktop and some of them rolled onto the floor.
Louis Catorze, who was hovering nearby when the incident took place, gave chase to one stray macadamia and sniffed it quizzically. Then he ran for the hills as if he’d just been poked in the eye with a sharp stick.
I can’t imagine what narrative must have been going on his head to make him think, “Sight of a macadamia: interesting and worthy of further investigation. Smell of a macadamia: MERDE, GET ME OUT OF HERE.” Or perhaps The Mothership beamed him a message to say, “Sniff it and run away, just to see what she does. Go on, it’ll be funny!”
For the non-believers among you, here is the little sod fleeing from the offending macadamia. And, yes, I needed a little help from my good friend the black markup pen, on Catorze’s rear view:
Running away up-tailed makes the whole thing even more weird.
When Cat Daddy noticed the ferocity with which Louis Catorze pounced upon a newly-opened pack of Orijen, he suggested that we start buying the small packs instead of the fractionally less expensive medium-sized ones. I may have mentioned this previously on Le Blog, but I’m mentioning it again as I’m sure Cat Daddy will deny that it was his idea and start complaining about the cost again. (The smaller packs are 9p per kg more expensive than the medium-sized ones.)
Last week it was time to re-order as Louis Catorze was on his last pack of Orijen. We had stopped our medium pack subscription with Petscorner.co.uk with the intention of restarting on the small pack but, when I tried to resume the subscription, I discovered that they were out of stock.
Orijen’s main website was also all out although, annoyingly, they had supplies of the Orijen Six Fish for dogs. (Yes, I did compare the ingredients lists to see if there was a difference. And, yes, I did consider trying it to see if Catorze would notice, but I had grotesque visions of each pellet being the size of a brick and the silly sod overstretching his tiny jaws to eat them, like a snake swallowing a whole cow.)
Merde.
Eventually I managed to find the last five packs in the world at Mypetwarehouse.co.uk, so I ordered all five. Since then I have found a few more places that stock the small pack, and I think the Orijen site may have replenished its stocks now, but my hopes of finding a reliable subscription service are dwindling. I want to be able to subscribe and then forget about it. I don’t want to have to order from a different place every time and pay delivery costs because they don’t have enough stock to enable me to meet the free delivery threshold. Yet this still beats the horror of leaving Catorze foodless and screaming.
When I told Cat Daddy about this, he muttered something about Brexit, supply chains and some other thing that I don’t remember. He doesn’t stockpile – in fact, he thinks people who do stockpile are scaremongering idiots – yet even he was encouraging me to buy every single pack of Orijen Six Fish Cat (and Dog, if I had to) that I could lay my hands on.
More Orijen than he can handle.
It shouldn’t be this complicated, should it? But then “complicated” is what Catorze is and does.
Cat Daddy took these pictures during an especially rambunctious Boys’ Club and, throughout the session, he was telling Catorze what an emotional and financial drain he is and how unhelpful this is when the country is gripped by what we keep calling a Cost of Living Crisis (but, in fact, is really a Cost of Voting for the Wrong Party and Having Them Do Us Over Crisis). Luckily Catorze didn’t understand and, even if he did, he wouldn’t have given a merde.
One of the last alfresco Boys’ Clubs of the summer.It was quite the session.
At the weekend I was chat-sitting Blue the Smoke Bengal whilst his mamma was away.
I am very lucky that I was trusted to look after him, after what happened last time. During the Easter holidays I was supposed to feed him from Sunday evening to Thursday morning, and I forgot. I don’t know how I could have possibly done such a thing, but I did.
Cat Daddy and I were out walking on the Monday morning when I remembered. We had just reached the point in our walk where we could choose between the long route and the short route and, naturellement, after realising my grave oversight, we chose the latter and powered round as quickly as possible so that we could get home for Blue. As we walked we debated whether or not I should tell Blue’s mamma, and I was leaning more towards not saying anything if he were fine when I arrived.
I felt awful about it, and I told Cat Daddy that I’d be livid if someone had done this to Louis Catorze.
Cat Daddy: “Would you really, though?”
Me: “Actually … maybe not. If it were just one day, then no.”
Cat Daddy: “But if they didn’t say anything, and I found out afterwards, I’d be pissed off.”
Merde.
When I went to Maison Blue, I discovered that his mamma had had a Ring doorbell fitted since the last time I went over. Those things send you a notification if you have so much as an leaf blowing past, so she would know perfectly well that I hadn’t been over on the Sunday evening.
MERDE.
Luckily Blue was perfectly ok, and he purred and rolled when I walked into the house. As I cuddled him, I said, “I’m so sorry, boy. I let you down yesterday evening, didn’t I?” I then realised that there was another camera-type device plugged into the hallway, which had probably recorded what I’d said.
MERDE MERDE MERDE.
In terms of evidence against me, it doesn’t get much worse than video surveillance and a taped confession. If this were a criminal investigation, Blue’s mamma’s legal team would be pressing for the death penalty.
Anyway, when she gave me some lovely chilli goat’s cheese to say thank you for looking after Blue, I decided that I couldn’t accept it with a clear conscience and so I confessed. Blue’s mamma was absolutely fine about it, and clearly didn’t think my offence was cheese-withholdingly bad because she insisted that I take the gift anyway. She added that Blue was a bit of a chubber and so one delayed meal wouldn’t have done him any harm. This is true. Plus he is an adept hunter, AND he is clearly visiting at least one household for their all-you-can-eat self-service buffet, so he certainly wouldn’t have starved to death.
Here is the big sod, telling me to hurry the hell up with his food:
Three days after our friends’ visit, Louis Catorze’s dandruff miraculously vanished. His fur is now glossy and beautiful, without a single pesky white flake in sight. Although I cannot prove it, I know he has done this on purpose.
My friend Lizzi: “I told you he’d do this! But he’s pulled it off even sooner than I thought.”
Whatever. You’re not helping.
In other, equally odd news, it seems Catorze is enjoying his Orijen so much that he’s been bringing it up to bed. Oui, Mesdames et Messieurs. When changing the sheets the other day, I found this underneath the covers, at the pillow end:
Right. I see.
I was actually relieved to discover that it was Orijen and not some other heinous substance. But how did it get there?
Theory 1: It was caught on Catorze’s paw. But how did it stick? How did it not fall off on the way upstairs?
Theory 2: It was caught on my clothing. Again, how did it stick?
Theory 3: Catorze brought it in his mouth to save for later. Frankly this is the weirdest idea of them all, as it takes far more effort to bring one piece all the way upstairs than to just eat it from his bowl, but I wouldn’t put it past him. After all, this is the same individual who thought to drop a slug onto my pillow in the middle of the night.
Are there other treasures being squirrelled away in there? (And do I want to know what they are?)
Louis Catorze’s dandruff has been deteriorating, and I noticed that it looked especially bad just before a friend was due to visit. We couldn’t have him looking scaly and gross in front of visitors so I tried to brush it out, but each brush stroke seemed to just dredge up more crud. I then decided to deploy the colloidal oatmeal powder.
This was probably the right idea. However, I should have executed it a lot better.
Rather than tipping out the powder and letting him roll around in it or his own accord, for whatever stupid reason I decided, instead, to tip it straight from the pack onto his body whilst he lay on my lap. Instead of the light dusting for which I had hoped, huge lumps of oatmeal fell out, each one breaking into a zillion pieces when it hit la personne royale. Each one of those zillion pieces then hit me, breaking into a further zillion pieces as they did so.
Extracting the oatmeal most certainly was not a piece of cake.
The next twenty minutes or so were spent chasing a white cat around the living room and attempting to brush/beat the oatmeal out of him. It only half-worked. When my friend arrived, rather than being dandruff-free, Catorze was still grey in some areas and peppered with both dandruff AND oatmeal, and I was worried that his attempts to groom it off would leave him with stomach cramps or constipation. Luckily this turned out not to be the case, and, because our friend knows the little sod very well, she didn’t bat an eyelid when we said there had been “an oatmeal incident”.
Post-groom mess.
We can’t think of any reason why Catorze’s skin would suddenly deteriorate and, as with the mats, we will check with the vet just in case. Happily, Le Roi is utterly unfazed by it and is continuing to live his best life.
jesuisleroisoleil 