We've started to allow the cats to roam the house freely at night. Cleo actually preferred to be shut into the kitchen, dining room and living room at night (she'd pester us to tuck her in bed if we let her roam free), but Bella and Bianca seemed to want a bit more freedom. Inevitably, what happens is that they sleep on our bed: not always both at the same time, but at one point or another there will be somewhere between zero and two cats plus two humans on or in our bed.

This is fine by me. I like having them on the bed at night, as there's nothing more restful than a purring, sleepy cat. The only problem is that they are experts in claiming bed-surface real estate. In fact, they have the kind of devious, strategic skill which would make them champion players of the Chinese game, Go, assuming that they could be bothered to play a game for abstract rewards, rather than something actually useful like duvet space. It starts off equitably enough, with Mr. Bsag and I each occupying half of the bed, and the cats slotted into the remaining spaces. At some point in the night, we will wake to find that Mr. Bsag and I are unaccountably teetering on the outer 10cm of our respective sides of the bed, with the cats stretched luxuriously across most of the remaining space. They are fairly placid about being lifted and moved to another area of the bed, but only — I suspect — because they just re-formulate their invasion plans (complete with large maps and little model cats and humans pushed around with long rakes) as soon as we've gone back to sleep.