Free at last

For years my sister and I have been confined to the kitchen during the night. You see when we were kittens, we were always hungry, so we would wake Annie and Martin up at three in the morning to ask for our breakfast. We did this by scratching their toes (which would often stick out from under the duvet), or by climbing onto their bed and purring loudly into their ears. I had a particularly effective technique of inserting a claw into A’s nostril as she slept, and gently but firmly pulling until the pain woke her up.

Even better was the “diverging beds strategy”. M used to live in a rented flat with two single beds, which he would push together to create a king-size sleeping facility. Inevitably, these single beds would drift apart during the night. If I lay in wait under the two beds waiting for the crack between them to widen a little, I could swipe my paw up through the gap, and scratch M’s arse quite savagely. (This one wasn’t in the interests of getting my breakfast, though. I just did it for a laugh.)

Anyway, now we’re old cats and not nearly as greedy or malicious as we were, so occasionally they let us have the run of the house while they sleep. This happened on two nights last week, and on the first I enjoyed the novelty, padding around the house in the dark, checking on things. I was quite tired the following day, having had only about twenty hours sleep on Thursday instead of my usual twenty-two. Then on Friday, I quite honestly forgot the doors were open, and stayed curled up in my bed under the kitchen table as normal. What a wasted opportunity!