How do they do that?

phoenix you know cats are not concerned with being careful where they lay their muddy paws or if they mess up their nice clean tray they have servants owners for that.

True, tanith but I'm still bewildered as to how Oliver Sprout seems to leave no grubby paw prints on any of the carpet he has to traverse, but can deposit so much mud on the window sill!

Bless him! Perhaps he's mastered levitation

I don't know about "bless him" loopy , I had to go to Dunelm yesterday for a new net/voile curtain for the bedroom window as somehow the old one had a great big rip in it

Oh dear phoenix, I have admit to getting very exasperated with our cats. We bought our three (Mulder, Scully and Mowgli) with us when we stopped farming years ago, and they had to get used to a far less rural lifestyle.
They settled well but to the detriment of curtains which they used as climbing apparatus, for some odd reason they enjoyed sitting on the pelmets!
This was despite having free access via the cat flap - which they used, so that wasn't the reason. I have to admit to a feeling of relief that we no longer have cats, and I certainly won't miss emptying the cat litter bomb sites!

Ours only has access to her tray when shut in at night or in bad weather. She seems to save the need to go for these times spreading litter from one side of the utility to the other grrr. Despite having the use of a cat flap and large garden.

I eventually stopped having litter trays as the three 'Mouseketeers' would pop in just to use them !
Crafty lot, cats!

Mia goes out for ages, then makes a bee line for the litter tray as soon as she comes in!

Oliver Sprout is, we have decided, just a HOOLIGAN! A very loving and affectionate chap, but a hooligan just the same. He doesn't actually climb the curtains as such, more that he has a bit of trouble navigating through them to carry out his early morning birdwatching. loopy we don't have pelmets over our windows, but however he does very much like having a bit of a snooze on top of the kitchen cupboards. The first time I became aware of this was when I was innocently chopping some meat on a board on the worktop when something akin to a tabby Ninja appeared to descend from nowhere! He also spends quite a bit of time out and about, and hardly (if ever) bothers with the litter tray. He leaves that to Digby, who seems to think he is far too delicate to venture forth in inclement weather. "Delicate" my arse derriere, he weighs over a stone!

, that's brilliant!
No longer have pelmets (they came with the house). The cats would launch themselves off at unsuspecting humans, I probably still have the scars on my back, so changed them to curtain poles but cats decided even more fun if took a running leap because the curtains would move along the poles....
I swear Mowgli would have collected ASBOs galore had he been human. His best trick was to get through the neighbours' upstairs toilet or bathroom windows, only when the rooms were occupied -he wasn't popular! If anyone left a window open he would just climb in and make himself at home.
One neighbour fed him for a month, bought him a posh collar, litter tray etc before discovering he also lived with us

As you so rightly said earlier, loopy they are indeed a crafty lot on the whole! But I do fear that our beloved Squeaky Fatarse Digby lacks the crafty gene. Please don't mention it in cat society, but he does seem to be a bit dim.

I'm also at a loss as to how Oliver Sprout gets such a grubby chin! It looks almost as if he has been using it for ploughing! I now keep an old toothbrush especially for chin scrubbing.

As he just come into the office to present himself, (he likes to let you know that he is gracing you with his presence) while he was sitting half on the desk and half on the keyboard, I decided to give him a scrub. There is now lots of dried mud etc on my notepad.

, he's got you so well trained
Our dimmest cerebrally-challenged cat was Tobias. I swear he'd been dropped on his head as a kitten, everything in life baffled him from seeing his own reflection in a mirror to deciding that he had to go through the cat flap backwards..... a cat of verylittle brain or hope really
He lost his 9 lives within his first 12 months which really says it all!

loopy I too have had cats that I can only describe as "special needs"!

Sadly the three cats we moved in with, Maurice (the only one we had from a kitten) Lily( definitely special needs ) and Clucky are now permanently residing in the garden. RIP my lovely's

However the current residents are very much loved, despite their little foibles/peccadillos!

As most GN'ers know, I live alone during the week as Mr P is working in Hampshire, and odd though it may seem, the chaps are actually quite good company in their own way!

You know the saying....dogs have owners, cats have staff. Very true in my house!