One day last week I was working from home. As often happens at about 3.30 or 4 pm, the cats decided that it was time for their dinner. They start strutting about on the desk, staring pointedly at me from about 5 cm away¹, chewing my hair, rolling on my keyboard, and flicking my pens off the desk. As you can imagine, this does not make for a conducive working environment, so at some point I usually crack and go to shut them in downstairs.

They may have Doctorates in being annoying, but handily for me they are also very gullible. Thus, if I walk downstairs and go towards the kitchen, they run eagerly in front of me. This allows me to calmly shut the kitchen door on them, thus confining them to the living room/dining room and kitchen, and allowing me to get on with my work. They fall for this every time.

Anyway, I went through the same procedure this time, and got back to work. Some time later, I got a call from Mr. Bsag. I had been chatting to him for a couple of minutes, idly stroking Bianca who was on the desk, when it suddenly dawned on me that Bianca was on the desk. What the? Perhaps I had imagined the whole ‘shutting them in downstairs’ episode? No, I remembered very clearly doing that. No, I thought, I know what’s happened. I probably didn’t pull the living room door all the way shut, and she just pushed against it to open it.

After the call, during which I broke off mid-sentence to exclaim, “I’ve just realised that Bianca is on the desk!!”, to mild confusion from Mr. Bsag, I went back downstairs to check the door. There really should have been some dramatic, “dun Dun DUUN!!” music at this point, because all the doors were securely shut. It’s like one of those locked room mysteries, except that instead of a murdered victim inside a locked room, there’s an excitable cat rolling on your keyboard when it should be inside the locked room.