All my pets:

1. A rabbit, when we lived in Nigeria. Can’t remember what it was called, but I do remember this: we went on holiday once, and asked the neighbour to take care of it while we were away. When we got back, no rabbit. We asked the neighbour and he said “Yes, I took care of it, like you asked. Thank you, it was very tasty.”

2. Another rabbit, this time in London, called Tango, which I think we may have inherited from an elderly neighbour. Old and grumpy (rabbit, not neighbour, though who knows?), he would run around you in rings and then nip your ankles. Gave me my first experience of construction, as he kept breaking out of his hutch, so we had to keep shoring it up with chicken wire and wood. Died at a ripe old age, and was found stretched out and stiff in the garden. I remember being fascinated by how long he was.

3. A guinea pig, the first pet I named. I called her Debbie. I must have been 7 or so. Snuffled a lot and once climbed up inside my favourite jumper and got her fat head stuck at the narrow end of my batwing sleeve. Damn, the early eighties were cruel.

4. Gerbils. There were two of them both male, or both female (there was a lot of debate), an albino one which was mine, and a sandy brown one, which was my brother’s. Mine, I called Snow White, D’s was Ghengis Khan, which probably speaks volumes. We got them one saturday afternoon from a pet shop in Shepherd’s Bush, and I remember distinctly being told how to pick them up by the tail. When we got home, I picked Snow White up by the tail, only I only had hold of the very end of the tail, which promptly fell off. I was traumatised. Though not, on reflection, as traumatised as she must have been. They lived happy lives until a friend of the family came to stay, bringing her carcat, Brindle, with her. One day, we got home from school to find carnage. The door ajar, the cage knocked over and gaping emptily, Snow White mauled and bloody underneath the guestroom bed, the cat grooming proudly on the stairs and Ghengis nowhere to be found.

5. A hamster, which I named Daley Thompson after his habit of running, constantly, as well as swinging across the roof of the cage. A natural athlete, Daley did all the cute Hamstery things you might expect, and eventually got old and wobbly, and needed to be put down. In fact, we were in the vet, waiting for it to be done when someone came in saying they’d just found…

6. …another hamster, walking down the Great Western Road, with a limp. Hardy little bugger. The vet said we could take him home, with his broken leg in a splint, but he might not live very long. We named him Sid Vicious after his punk lifestyle, and the fact that he was hard as nails, gnawing away at everything in sight, eating his way through his wheel, cage bars, the plastic bottom of the cage, the water bottle that poked through the bars, his food bowl…everything. Although he lived for much longer than expected, unsurprisingly he died of a stomach ulcer a couple of years later.

7. Two more gerbils, principally my sister’s responsibility, as they’d come from her friend. I think they were called Sugar and Spice, and they were only with us a very short while before turning on each other and one ate the other, and then died him(or her)self. Sugar and Spice, not very nice.

8. A black and white cat, Bobbins, rescued from the local shelter. I think he real name was David, but that’s a silly name for a cat, so Bobbins it was (Bobbins is local North Derbyshire slang for bollocks, which you might say when you drop something, ie “Oh, BOBBINS!” or as a substitute for rubbish “He’s talking a load of bobbins”). He was a tough old sod, adventurous and playful. He got hit by a car, and walked home, collapsing only when he was inside the house. He got his jaw wired and a brain operation, and was never quite the same again (he ran with a list to the side, and couldn’t quite shut his mouth) but still lovable and silly all the same.

9. Another cat, Poppy, black and small and very clingy. She was around for four years or so, before being run over when I was living in Bolivia. Very sad.

10. While all the above were family pets, two years ago, P and I got our own cat, Pickle (because she’s the colours of Branston), rescued from Hounslow Animal Welfare as a stray when she was about 2 years old. She’s a tortie, quite little and neat. She’s very vocal, too, chattering away merrily whenever you enter the room. She was a bit shy at first, but now she’s a total lap cat, often sitting on my knee when I’m at the computer, plus she wanders into the bedroom at dawn and curls up next to my shoulder and rumbles away. Very sweet, and totally gorgeous. I admit, I’m a bit dappy about Pickle, as you may be able to tell.

Addendum: May not count, but for the sake of completeness….

11. When I was in primary school, we (kids) used to spend a big chunk of every summer with friends of the family who lived on a farm in the Yorkshire Dales. They had a dog - Playdy (no idea where the name came from, though for some reason I have the words Play-Dog-Digger in my ehad). So, many happy summers spent yomping through prickly hay fields and tumbling down hills and splashing through freezing becks. I can still remember the very specific smell of wet dog. Not altogether unpleasant…

12. In Bolivia, the flat (well, outhouse) which I rented in Cochabamba came with two canine residents - Oso (trans: bear), a big mean-looking but ultimately dim German Shepherd, and Mili, a tiny little beagle puppy. They spent a lot of time in and around my little shack, and I spent a lot of time with them, feeding them, playing with them and mostly trying to convince them not to bark and wake up the family whose house I lived behind (and who owned them) when I crept in after midnight. Dirty stop-out.

13. Next door’s cat. Come on, we’ve all done it, don’t look at me in that disapproving way. Our next door neighbours for a year or so had two cats, one of which was very adventurous. They had stupid names, though - Jazz and Mambo, IIRC. Anyway, Jazz (who we ended up calling Beardy, because, well, you can guess) took to breaking in through open windows and availing himself of our hospitality on a regular basis. You know, just hanging out in the kitchen and so on. This was possibly because the neighbours (identikit SW Londoners called Sam and Alex or something) didn’t have a catflap, so left their food out for them all day. And when it rained, well…. you can see where this is going. Plus the food was often nicked by other cats and foxes etc, plus Lucy and James (or whatever) were out a lot, plus we were naturally touched when little Beardy eyed us up as surrogate parents food-providers. So yeah, eventually we broke down and bought a small box of dry cat food - only a small one, I swear - and gave him the odd one or two. But no more. And we were just trying not to be cruel, I swear. We weren’t at all trying to steal him. Honest. Ahem.

(Originally posted a chunk of this on Vox)