I should’ve known the baby gates were no match for a persistent kitty. Not this one, anyway. You can practically see the calculations and computations going on in his head: “Hmmm… will it hold me if I jump from here?”

Xena would’ve figured it out eventually, given time. She’s pretty clever: she’ll just kick back and leave the plotting and scheming to Beano and copy whatever solution he’s found. Why reinvent the wheel?

It was pathetic the way they’d stick their paws through the fence gaps, like I’d shoved them into a carrier and took them to the vet. It was also getting a little absurd: I had to line the top of the landing with tall objects to stop them from jumping up to a launching point for the stairs, but one time when I was taking out the rubbish I heard a thump and knew Beano had jumped up and knocked something over to get down.

‘So much for that,’ I thought to myself.

It wasn’t until very recently that Beano got bold enough to test out the sturdiness of the gates, which is something I’m sure he’d done with the drying racks, only to arrive at the conclusion that they were wobbly and as stable as a pile of wire hangers.

But Beano somehow managed to find the time in his busy schedule of catnapping and litterbox excavations to conduct a weight-and-balance test on the second gate:

Sigh. I give up.