I notice — because it’s been reported everywhere, even in Vanity Fair — that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have bought their children a hamster called Marvin. This is a common parental mistake. They’ll have assumed, like I did: “Great: a low-maintenance pet which will teach them responsibility, nurturing and to clean up tiny turds without whingeing.” And, like I was, they’ll be wrong.
What a hamster brings is a) tears when it escapes, inevitably and repeatedly, after biting the kids with its Nosferatu teeth; b) marital discord when the purchaser (me) fails to spot the rodent is chewing through the TV cable just before a football match; c) endless guilt that the pet is caged so you buy it ever fancier “palaces”, plus a harness and lead to take it on walks, which it loathes; d) rancour when the kids lose interest after three weeks and you’re left scraping out its stinky sawdust (though royals will have flunkies for that).
Dogs and cats show a child what it is to be loved, but hamsters teach only rejection, their sole mission being to escape you. Once, ours went Awol for six weeks during a brutally cold winter and I fretfully imagined it frozen solid to some drainpipe. Then I heard scuffling and found it in the cellar, emaciated like a sucked-out kiwi fruit, having possibly lived on spiders and whatever was already packed into its face. We bought an even better super-deluxe cage after that, but it still hated us. And then it died, as hamsters do at about age two, stiff as a board in its food bowl. The world’s press may gush at the Cambridges having done something “adorably” mainstream, but I’ve a hunch the next story we read about Marvin will be rather darker.
Turnout, turn off
I usually get a low-key, low-tech thrill from voting but yesterday I did so with irritation. Where I am, Liverpool, there were three ballot papers, for mayor, councillor and police commissioner, making 16 candidates in all. Yet how many leaflets have I had through the door? Two. How many doorstep canvassers? None. Honestly. People want your vote without introduction; it’s like expecting coitus without even a polite nod to foreplay. Maybe I should have followed the lead of a friend yesterday, deliberately spoiling one ballot because she considers the police commissioner gig a thin blue gravy train. Instead I meekly voted but without declaring a second choice. Yeah, that’ll show ’em.
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Test swot
Going for an eye test weirdly taps my inner juvenile. Maybe it’s sitting in a small, dark room in too-close proximity to a stranger that gives me a nervous compulsion to snigger or, worse, cite Father Jack’s eye test in Father Ted when his chart fortuitously spelt out “feck” and “arse” (how opticians must wish they had a pound for each time someone’s cracked that joke). And why do I try so hard to impress the optician, squinting and gurning to read too-small letters (“No, no wait, I’ll get it”) like a swotty pupil or, once, cheating by using both eyes? What the hell’s that about? It’s not as though they’re going to stand around admiring my prescription saying, “Wow, see that? Hardly any change at all”. Yet I know I’ll do the same next time. Pitiful.
Shady character
The sun has made its first outing of 2016 where I live, peeping through the gunmetal grey curtain of cloud so perkily that, briefly, I even considered removing my thermal vest. And the very minute it shone the phone rang. It was a cold caller. He was selling solar panels. It was a special offer! And, would you believe my luck, they were currently “working in my area”? Now as it happens I’ve always fancied solar panels but how can anyone take seriously a stranger who opens with, “And how are YOU today?” while lying about being just round the corner? Besides, as I told him, it’s been so gloomy here lately the solar lights in my garden would barely illuminate an ant’s tea party. For now I’ll stick with a combi boiler.