The Hamster Diaries 1

The decision to purchase hamsters went something like this:

In the pub on Friday night, already drunk.

Me: I want a hamster. I'm going to buy a hamster.

Everyone Else: Brilliant.

The Girlfriend: Really?

Me: Yes ... actually, ask me again when I'm sober.

The following morning I decide not to buy a hamster, I buy a cactus instead. The cactus has googly eyes so therefore fills the girlfriend's cute quotient for the day. She likes anything small and adorable to an extent bordering on the pathological.

Over the course of the following week however, the desire for a hamster grows, I read about hamsters on the internet - I look at pictures of them. I decide, with the girlfriend's help, exactly what sort of hamster I want; first we plump for Robrovski hamsters, which are small and very fast. I like the idea of a fast pet, I want an animal with some definite quality that can be pointed to. I want to be able to point at it and say "this is my pet fluffy, he can clock thirty miles on the flat" - or "he can lift ten times his own body weight" - or "he can detect one drop of blood in a million drops of water" - or "he can dislocate his own jaw and swallow an Alsatian whole, and given half a chance he would." With a normal hamster I only have the one fallback position of "he can store food in his cheek pouches and does a passable impersonation of Dizzy Gillespie when he does.' With a Robrovski hamster, I don't need to worry about this.

There is part of me, you see, that does not think a grown man should own a hamster. Dogs, cats, snakes, and tropical fish all very well, but hamsters! Hamsters are kid's pets. There is part of me that fears the moment when I tell somebody I have hamsters and they look at me funny and say "Hamsters! Why hamsters?" and all I will be able to reply is:

"Because they're cute.'

-which, not to put too fine a point on it, is going to sound a bit gay.

Nevertheless, for all their great speed and remarkably tiny size and adorable scruffy faces, Robrovski hamsters are rejected on the grounds that they are not that tameable. There is another reason, see, for getting hamsters and it is this. I like to eat cookies in bed, this causes crumbs, and a tame hamster could solve the crumb problem in a stroke. Like a tiny self operating vacuum cleaner.

We plump for Russian Dwarf hamsters because they are also adorable, also tiny, generally more laid back than the Rob's, and there is a breeder nearby who has two to sell. Buying from a breeder, the internet informs me, is an essential if you do not want your hamster to bite you.

I send an e-mail and arrange to pick up the hamsters on the following Saturday.