stool

Le jeu de trônes

~ iamthesunking ~ 5 Comments

Today’s entry is dedicated to Rachel, a much-loved follower of Le Blog. She was drily witty, interested in people and had the unique skill of making every person feel that their cat was the best and most fascinating cat in the world – yes, even mine, which is quite some feat. Rachel, you would relate to this, especially as your kitties would always sit on things that they weren’t meant to sit on: the clothes that you had put aside for the charity shop, your wheelchair, your pillow (without tucking the tail around the arse – ugh) and so on. We miss you and hope that, wherever you may be, you are happy and surrounded by maddening, shouty, delightful cats. (With tucked tails.)

Good news: we have found a way of stopping Louis Catorze from scratching the footstool. Bad news: we have had to surrender it to him as a cat throne. So now he has a total of THREE cat thrones: 2 outdoor ones, of which Le Roi needs both at once, and the new indoor one. See below for both:

It really was the only solution. Imagine you had the inclination to destroy some brand new furniture: would you destroy your own, or someone else’s? Exactly. Even Louis Catorze has the brains to figure out that trashing your own stuff is stupid; since the footstool officially became la propriété de la monarchie, it hasn’t been scratched once.

Sometimes Le Roi graciously allows Cat Daddy to rest his feet on it, but only if he can sleep on Cat Daddy’s outstretched legs.

Think of it as a quid pro quo but with a slightly selfish bias: “quid pro”, maybe.

Or perhaps even just “quid”.

Le tabouret du Roi

~ iamthesunking ~ 6 Comments

Cat Daddy recently bought a brand new scratching post. Now, it wasn’t because he wanted to do something nice for Louis Catorze: it was because he wanted to park in Pets at Home’s customers-only car park but didn’t want to be that despicable person who parks there without buying anything.

When he brought the scratching post home, Louis Catorze rushed immediately towards it, scratched happily away (see photo), and all was well with the world … for a whole 24 hours.

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The next day, Cat Daddy’s heart-stoppingly expensive footstool arrived, from the same company that supplied the swish drinks trolley (yes, THAT drinks trolley: https://louiscatorze14.wordpress.com/2016/02/20/papa-est-decu/). Through some cruel ironie du sort, Louis Catorze now thinks the footstool is his scratching post. And to say that Cat Daddy is displeased about this could not be a bigger understatement.

He has tried to protect the footstool when not in use by leaning cushions against it, but the little sod just pulls them away. We have put the scratching post in front of the footstool, but Catorze just sidesteps it. Shouting “No!” at him when he starts to scratch usually works, but of course it doesn’t stop him from scratching when we’re not around.

Bits of the stitching and fabric are already starting to come away from the footstool, and we’ve only had it for a few days. Meanwhile, the scratching post is still as pristine as it was on the day it was made.

Although I hope that Louis Catorze will miraculously just stop scratching one day, deep down I know that the only solution is to get rid of the offending item.

Cat Daddy just read this over my shoulder and huffed, “I couldn’t have put it better myself – but who the hell would be stupid enough to have him?”

Actually, I meant … oh, never mind.

Papa s’énerve

~ iamthesunking ~ 3 Comments

image

I came downstairs this morning to find the living room looking like this, and my initial thought was, “How cute: Cat Daddy has set up a viewing platform for his boy to watch the world go by.”

However, the truth was somewhat different; it turned out that, late last night, after I had gone to bed, Cat Daddy had heard a commotion outside and gone to investigate. And, as soon as the front door was open, Louis Catorze had bolted off into The Forbidden Front and refused to come back.

The shutters were open so that Cat Daddy could keep a lookout for Catorze’s pathetic face meowing to be let in again. The Fortnum and Mason box thing was where Cat Daddy spent ages sitting, because he couldn’t see out properly from the sofa, and the stool was in place not as a viewing platform but as a resting place for the bottle of wine he needed to fuel his vigil.

“Can you believe it?” Cat Daddy sighed. “I didn’t dare go to bed leaving him outside at The Front. Yet, every time I tried to catch him, he’d run away, then stop and scream for a bit, then run further away. So I had to sit there until really late and wait for him to decide to come back.”

“At least we’ve learned that he comes back,” I said.

“Yeah,” Cat Daddy countered, “but we’ve also learned that he’s a little shit.”

Oh dear. Maybe Louis Catorze needs to be told that, if he keeps up this kind of behaviour, Papa Noël won’t be stopping by …