Manic Mouse

MOUSEY, MY CHINESE HAMSTER misbehaved severely last night. I call him Mousey because he does resemble a mouse but with no proper tail to speak of and a black stripe down the back (it's a go-faster stripe, and it works!) and he does have cheek pouches, although he barely ever seems to use them. So technically he is a hamster. And he comes from China. And he has balls the size of brazil nuts. Mother Hubbard says no wonder the little mite spends such long hours sleeping; it's surely the fatigue of having to drag them everywhere he scuttles ...

Mousey is very tame. When I poke him out of whichever one of five nests he's dozing in at that moment he pulls a dishevelled "oh please don't torment me by making me play," face. Introduced to my cuff he crawls gratefully up my sleeve where he settles down for yet more sleep.

So Mouse is asleep. It is three a.m. Before very long, I am asleep. Then Mousey picks his moment to wake up. Then I wake up and catch elongated Mouse about to drop from sleeve. Mouse, to the best of his formidable acting powers pretends not to be gutted at being thwarted. Bides his time. Eventually does catch me truly unconscious and runs away ...

I wake up and gaah! The swine has escaped. Not to worry; this has happened a million times. Usually I just wait ten minutes and catch him darting about my Axminster-stylee hearthrug playing Furry Scalectrix. Not last night, though. The swine was nowhere to be found. After an hour I was despairing. I kept hearing faint mouse-type of noises, though I could never pin them down... And when I did eventually find him, guess where he was? Sleeping, he'd burrowed between the mountains of my multitudinous pillows and hollowed out an Arabian Nights-style mouse-nest there. The kind of nest a mouse must squeak: "Open sesame!" to get into. When I picked him out and bunged him back in his drab old cotton wool fishtank nest he was absolutely gutted. That is where he is going to have to stay from now on: I can't stand the stress of wild Chinese animals running free any more ...