On Saturday 7 February my wife and I finally succumbed to the combined pester power of our four children and bought a hamster. They’ve been nagging us for over a year to buy them a pet and this seemed like the least hassle. We opted for a six-week-old Syrian with reddish-brown fur and white patches. We decided to call her Roxy on account of her being so pretty. It’s short for Roxana, the Bactrian princess that Alexander the Great fell in love with.
I quickly realised that hamsters are a bit like printers, in that you think you’ve got a bargain until you realise what the running costs are. Roxy herself was only £10, but the cage set me back £65 and her food is so expensive that I’d be better off taking her to the Savoy Grill every day.
When we got home, we had to lay down a few ground rules to prevent her escaping. On no account were the children to take her out without adult supervision and once she was back in her cage it was absolutely vital to ensure that the door was firmly shut. To ram this home, I stressed that she was very unlikely to survive if she got out. Either she’d find her way into the garden, where she’d be eaten by a fox, or she’d scramble up the chimney, in which chase she’d be burnt to a frazzle next time we lit a fire. ‘Her best hope would be getting stuck beneath the floorboards where she’d slowly starve to death,’ I said.
The children looked suitably horrified and swore up and down that they’d never leave her cage open.
Fast-forward to last Saturday night. Everyone had gone to bed and I was settling down to watch Match of the Day. Before it started, I decided to look in on Roxy, who was clinging anxiously to her bars, looking lonely and desperate. ‘Poor thing,’ I thought, and carefully lifted her out of her cage and placed her in the Perspex exercise ball we’d been persuaded to buy by the owner of the pet shop (£25). I then put her on the floor of the sitting room where she happily rolled around for the next 90 minutes. Afterwards, I put her back in her cage and went to bed.
I was woken at 6 a.m. the following morning by my eight-year-old daughter in tears. Sasha had come down to discover the door of Roxy’s cage had been left open overnight and there was no sign of her. ‘It’s all my fault,’ she wailed. ‘I was the last to play with her. I’m a terrible person.’
Rather foolishly, I immediately pointed out that I was the one to blame, at which point she stopped crying and narrowed her eyes. ‘I hate you,’ she said. ‘You’re the worst daddy in the world.’
Before long, the other children were up and my attempts to reassure them that Roxy would be OK — ‘Plenty of rodents survive in the wild’ — fell on deaf ears. ‘What if she’s been eaten by a fox?’ asked Sasha. Six-year-old Ludo ran to the kitchen and reappeared with a large breadknife, at which point he started trying to jemmy up the floorboards. I was powerless to stop him. ‘What if she’s under there, daddy?’ he said. ‘She’ll starve to death.’ Needless to say, I have not been allowed to light a fire since.
At the time of writing, Roxy has not rematerialised and I’m still in the doghouse. Sasha is a drama queen at the best of times, but the hamster’s disappearance has propelled her to new heights. ‘I feel as though I’ve lost a sister,’ she told me on Sunday night, her little body convulsing with sobs. I managed to avoid pointing out that we’d only had Roxy for eight days and filed the comment under ‘funny stories to tell at her wedding’. But the truth is I feel pretty bad about it.
Every night I set a trap, which consists of a piece of Hot Wheels track leading up to a bucket full of hamster food. So far, no Roxy, but on Monday night I did hear a faint scratching sound coming from the cupboard under the kitchen sink. Ten minutes later I was on my hands and knees peering into the cupboard with a torch having emptied the entire contents on to the kitchen floor. Again, nothing. My latest wheeze is to borrow the next-door neighbour’s Manchester terrier, but knowing my luck he’ll probably ferret her out and then swallow her in one gulp. The only solution may be to get a dog of our own. At least you don’t have to buy them a cage.
Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
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