I know that cats are renowned for being curious (and it being the cause for their untimely demise), but I have never come across such nosy cats as our present pair. You really can’t do anything without having a little furry ‘helper’ wanting to join in.

Recently I’ve been doing a bit of tinkering around the house, like connecting up a new hard drive to the Mac mini in the living room so that we can use the drive for Time Machine backups for the other computers. This meant that I had to stick my head deep into the TV cabinet thing that houses the TV (obviously) plus the Mac mini and assorted paraphernalia, so that I could connect up all the necessary cables. Almost immediately, I became aware of a slight tickling on my cheek and a furry face hove into my peripheral visual field. I turned my head slightly. Bianca was cramming herself into the narrow shelf of the cabinet, and looking intently at what I was doing. She turned to face me, wide-eyed and excited about the amazing things that were obviously about to happen now that she was — as is only proper — supervising the whole process.

I sighed. I could hardly see what I was doing in the confined space, but trying to do it with a furry body blocking my view was even harder. I firmly but gently removed her, telling her that when she evolved opposable digits and the ability to distinguish the Firewire 800 port from the USB 2.0 port, she could help, but for now, she was going to have to supervise from outside the cabinet. She protested, naturally enough.

I carried on, and got to the point when I was trying to feed one of the cables through the hole in the back of the cabinet so that I could route it from the bottom shelf to the top. As I pushed the cable through, a ginger ninja paw grabbed it, swiftly followed by a brown paw belonging to Bella who — unseen by me — had sauntered behind the cabinet to see what was occurring. There followed a rather one-sided tug-of-war, where I got increasingly irritated and Bella and Bianca thought it was a brilliant game. You really can’t do anything in our house without feline supervision, particularly if it involves excitingly dark confined spaces, suitcases or bags, wrapping paper, sellotape or anything that vaguely resembles string.