Cats and kittens are well-known for raising the question ‘are you really comfortable sleeping like that?’ to which the answer would be invariably ‘yes’, by virtue of the fact they’re soundly asleep and dreaming happy feline dreams.

So today, please enjoy six photos of cats, fast asleep in what humans would consider uncomfortable places.

Firstly, The Cat and her son, Ana, taking their siesta on some garlic which was drying in the drive. On the other side of the wall was the garden with comfortable grass and boxes, but it seemed that this old water tank was more desirable. Maybe it was the old cloths and towels which had been left on top of the tank (which The Cat had claimed for herself), or maybe they really were comfortable!

Next is The Cat, this time appearing solo under the title ‘a stone for my pillow, woe is me’. Again, there were much more comfortable places to sleep in the garden, or even in the boxes in the drive, but still she chose to nap here. And still she seemed to show no ill-effects, no stiff neck or creaking limbs – cats really are much superior to humans in their engineering.

Stardust and Ariel (The Blossoms), Kiwi’s kittens, asleep in a limestone plant trough in the front path. They were following their mother’s example (Kiwi liked these troughs) but space was at a premium for two growing youngsters on a hot day. We had long since given up trying to have perfect pot plants and were content if they combined something green, coupled with not being poisonous to the cats. It hadn’t taken long for cats to assume a higher importance than humans, and quite rightly so.

One of Flora’s kittens asleep in a food bowl wasn’t going to put his sibling off trying to get a snack. Food bowls were more popular than you might initially think as sleeping places for small kittens, on condition that they were either bowls containing dry food, or wet food bowls which had been completely emptied. Even small kittens weren’t silly enough to sleep in a bowl of wet food (although there were times that I looked as though I might have done that, especially when trying to wean kittens by hand-feeding them wet food!)

Swift napping on the fence-posts which formed a sloping walkway from the feeding station to the water tank. This was another strange but popular place for cats to nap, combining a comfortable, sloping wooden surface with maximum inconvenience to any other cats who wished to use the sloping poles to walk from the food bowls to the tank.

The header photo shows Dawn’s son Cetti and Flora’s son Dandy Grey fast asleep on the high wall under the olive tree. It was a smart place inasmuch as it was in the shade of the tree and there was a breeze up there, but a narrow wall with their heads hanging over hardly looked comfy.