Mr. Bsag has been away the past week on a printing course in Cornwall, so I've had the bed to myself. I wondered whether the cats would alter their sleeping arrangements, given the sudden increase in available space. Bella usually sleeps at my feet, or on my feet, so that I often wake in the night to find myself scrunched into a foetal position, while Bella stretches out in the bottom third of the bed. Bianca's visits are temperature dependent, and she is also the 'cat who likes to squeeze between two things'^1^. In the winter, she sneaks on to the bed in the middle of the night, and we wake to find her curled into an impossibly tiny space between us. It has been very warm, so I was sure she would sleep elsewhere, but I wondered if Bella might move onto Mr. Bsag's side.

The experienced cat owners among you are probably now shaking your heads ruefully at my naivety. "Bsag, Bsag", you're thinking, "why would you expect a cat to do something as logical as moving in to vacated space, rather than squashing into a small part of the already occupied space?" You would be right.

The first night he was away, she slept on his side for a small part of the night, and then — evidently deciding that there were limited opportunities to cause me to scrunch into a ball from that side — moved back to my feet, and stayed there for the remaining nights.

Bianca is less of a handful at night, but often manages to cause chaos during the day. Early yesterday morning, Mr. Bsag called me in a bit of a panic because he had misplaced his coach ticket: could I go in to his email and forward the copy of the ticket he had received to him so that he could pick it up on his phone? We normally keep his studio door shut, because there's so much stuff in there, and the cats cause havoc running around on printed work, bits of paper and so forth, but I was in a rush and couldn't stop Bianca slipping in.

In the time it took me to wake up Mr. B's computer, find the email and forward it to him, Bianca — purring madly all the while — had: strolled around on the desk and found a rubber band which she tried to eat and I had to rescue and hide in my pocket; knocked over a jar of brushes; and played with a couple of USB flash drives, knocking them off the desk and into the bin. Sometimes it's like babysitting a particularly destructive and talented toddler.

^1^ If there is a large sofa, with two cushions placed close together in the middle, she will invariably squeeze between the two cushions. ↑