(from 2016)
When my daughter was small we decided that a small
pet was in order - heartlessly, one that wasn’t going to live so long we would
still be looking after it when she was grown up and gone. We settled on a
Syrian Hamster. All Syrian hamsters around the world apparently come from one litter
discovered in the wild in 1930 - (you see, the real purpose of my posts is to
educate...) - although there are bigger and smaller varieties in the wild. Hamsters
can be tamed after a fashion and apart from vigorous and repeated acts of procreation
much prefer their own company. So they make an ideal small pet, although many a
hamster purchased has been secretly gestating and turned into a family. (One
later replacement did just that).
My daughter named it after a school friend, K. We purchased a cage - all tubes and paper
bedding, and waited for it to wake up at night, having slept like a log all
through the day. The main thing we learned was that hamsters like to escape.
Forget all those POW escape films, K was the master. If a tunnel could be dug, he/she/it would dig
it. If something could be scaled and with knotted sheets a descent made, then K
was your man or girl or whatever.
We had my wife’s grandmother living with us at the
time. She was in her nineties and her bed was in our former living room
downstairs, which now also contained a hamster cage and hamster. Fortunately
the hamster didn’t smell and Nana was stone deaf, although her eyesight was very
good. We got quite used to midnight ructions as she rang her bell and hollered
as a little face was seen myopically peering up at her. K’s greatest adventure
was to escape from the cage, travel through several rooms to the kitchen, scale
the vegetable rack, and purloin a whole carrot. It was a very large carrot -
several times the hamster’s size in length. K munched away a bit at the middle,
so that he/she/it could get a mouthful with several inches of carrot either
side and then made the long march to home. Unfortunately scaling the precipice
to get back into its own bed proved too much, and next morning we found a very grumpy
very tired hamster, still clutching its prize, and extremely reluctant to let
go of it.
Now why on earth did I suddenly think of K and a
chortling daughter after all these years? I guess it is because Mrs O had an
email yesterday from Amy Goddard, who we know well, to inform us that she has
just obtained - not a hamster - but a pygmy hedgehog. She sent us a photo. Think
cute, and intelligent comments like aaah and oooh. Amy and co. had a Labrador
dog for many years that sadly died recently, and only because there was now no
longer a dog to take an unhealthy interest in a rodent rival did they agree to
take on this spiky little creature from a rescue center. Apparently they act very
much like hamsters, and can be given exercise in much the same sort of ways.
All those years ago, our daughter called her hamster
K. Amy has called her pygmy hedgehog, Heggie-Sue. It probably comes from having
parents who almost go back to the era of Buddy Holly and Holly’s group the Crickets.
(I know they won’t mind that being said). Holly and his drummer Jerry Alison
wrote the song Peggy Sue to impress Allison’s high school sweetheart Peggy Sue
Garron. The subsequent marriage went down the tubes, and Allison spent the rest
of his career therapeutically thumping the hell out of a drum kit each night in
a hymn to his ex-wife because the world wanted to hear that distinctive song.
I remember I saw a version of the post-Holly
Crickets on tour with Nanci Griffith. Very good they were too. And lead singer Sony
Curtis (fine songwriter himself) introduced the song -
“Here’s a song our drummer wrote about his first
ex-wife... (pause) ...she gave him some of the best weekends of
her life...”
Then Wham, Bam, “If you knew Peggy Sue, then you
know why I feel blue...”
And Curtis did a good impersonation of Holly as he hiccupped
and gargled and burped his way through the song.
So I suppose this rambling post is about rock and
roll classics and pets and pygmy hedgehogs. I understand that Amy - songwriter
herself - has now resorted to plagiarism and has been heard wandering through
her kitchen:
Heggie-Sue, Heggie-Sue, Prickly, prickly, prickly,
prickly, Heggie-Sue...
I suggested that she may like to consider it for her
next album. However, for some unfathomable reason, she doesn’t seem all that
keen...
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