When we first purchased 2 kittens in November 2005 I quickly realised that my boys loved to scratch. We hadn't lived in the house long, so while I wasn't that bothered about whether the carpet was damaged as I knew it would be replaced, I was concerned about the number of times they got my sofa. While sometimes it seemed quite accidental, other times I would catch them getting ready for a good scratching session, and I found I couldn't always stop them in time, so it made sense to choose a scratching post and try and get them in the habit of using it.

I noticed that this was a cheap an basic option involving a square base covered in blue felt type fabric. There was then a cylindrical post to screw into the base, which was wrapped in a rope tightly. At the top of the post was a string with a pompom type ball to play with,

This came flat packed at Argos as most things do, so we needed to screw the sections together ourselves but this was very easy to do. Initially, this looked quite attractive with the contrast of blue and beige, and it was easy to capture a playful kittens attention by dangling the pompom ball in front of them.

We found that they would quite happily have a bit of a scratch at this, which would distract them from scratching elsewhere for a bit. The string bit did not last more than a couple of months as they managed to chew through it but they were still quite happy to scratch at it.

After a while I noticed firstly that the blue fabric was looking a bit tatty. One of my boys has ginger fur, and he left traces of this all over the base. I would try to hoover it with my Dyson, and it didn't work and you could still see the fur. I then tried brushing it off, which just made it look even more tatty.

Then as the boys got bigger, they were able to tip this over between them, and they would lie with their legs wrapped round it having a merry old fight with it. I wasn't too bothered by this, but it became clear when they were scratching on it that they were now getting too long in the body to be able to do more than a half hearted scratch on this, so it was no longer any use to us. I invested in a taller tree version for a while, which had its own faults, and eventually we gave up on a scratching post altogether for indoors.

Nowadays we still have just the ginger cat, and he tends to scratch at the bark on the trees in the garden, or if we are really unlucky he goes for the decking posts and trashes them instead. I am just grateful he stays away from my new settee and has only scratched it once.

Scratching posts do have a use when cats are young, but I think that they do outgrow this one as they get bigger because it is at least one foot too short. (This cat post comes up to my knee height, so about a foot and a half approximately in height. I paid £10 for it from Argos a few years ago, price as of 06/09/2011 is £8.99.)