All My Children

At first, my wife refused point-blank, but the children were so persistent, she finally agreed on a compromise. “OK,” she said, “I’m not promising anything, but we’ll just pop into the local pet shop and have a look.”

Silly girl.

When I got home that evening I was greeted by two ecstatic daughters, a hamster called Hamlet, a blue and white budgie called Timmy — and a look from my wife that warned me to keep quiet and say nothing. Continue Reading »

They say a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. I doubt if our eightyear-old daughter Kendall would agree with that particular piece of traditional wisdom.

This is because, when it comes to the care and feeding — and keeping — of pet cage birds, our middle daughter is about as successful as her mother used to be when she was a child.

You may recall previous accounts of my wife’s youthful experiences with pets: most notably cage birds and fish. She had dozens of them at varying stages of her childhood. And all of them went the same way — slain in their millions by my wife. Not through malice, I hasten to add, but simply through too much kindess, too much handling and far too much food. At one stage, my wife’s kill-rate of aquarium fish was so great she was supporting the country’s fishing industry all by herself. Continue Reading »

Most normal families look forward to Sundays as the traditional day of rest and/or recreation. Not my family.

This, of course, is perfectly natural. Face it: we are not what you would call a normal family.

For us, Sunday is just another working day; the day my wife the estate agent has to go out to work while I, fresh from a week of feet-on-the-office desk refuge from domestic strife, must revert once more to my role as a full-time househusband responsible for the care, feeding, control, cleaning, rescue and entertainment of an ever-increasing menagerie of diverse domestic life-forms. To wit … Continue Reading »