No More Pumblechooks For The Trotters

NO MORE TROTTERS AT ALL, in fact. with poor Spherical having passed away in her sleep mid-afternoon.

I am hamsterless and bereft.

Not long ago I still had three tiny trotters in a tank, just like tiny meerkats they loved one another and did everything together.

Itchy was the tiniest and bottom peck. Poor swine! This meant the other two treated her as their baby, grooming her half to death. Every day, when she was young, she would appear soaking wet from the (literal) licking her older sisters inflicted on her. Wet fur bashed up all over the place, she looked like a Porkshire terrier that had just got out of the bath.

Bashful took it on herself to be chief housemaid. When I gave them paper strips and cardboard, she chewed these into a nest. Hence the scruffy appearance of their former nest-collection (they rotated every few days, between three or four nests, all hamster made like the one I videoed). This is the one piece of film of the trotters (see yesterday's post) I managed to take and it's a miracle it ever got on Youtube at all, as I hadn't a clue how to put it on. The internet shop man very kindly did all the clicks for me ...

Spherical was so named because, compared to the others, she always seemed so enormously tubby. Looking at other people's roborovskis online from time to time I used to think, Why are my hammies so tiny? It turned out the smaller two were "runts". They never got any bigger than juvenile size, and died the first. But "Spherical" for all her tubby name, was really of normal robo-build. She was 5cm/2in long, about the length of my thumb.

The roborovskis used to sleep all in a heap in the same nest. At one point they had a lightbulb box full of seeds. It was my way of making sure they always had an emergency supply of food but they turned it into a bedroom. When I used to appear cooing with more dindins their three little pink noses would appear quivering at the entrance hole as if to say "What is this? Why are you disturbing us this early. You know we're nocturnal ..."

But it's no more pumblechooks from now on. These pumbles are the interior seedheads from red peppers, which they adored. Pumblechooks not to be confused with bumblechooks (from green peppers), tumblechooks (from yellow ones) or kermumblechooks (yellow ones with green blobs on). And if you believe that, you'll believe anything. I might be mad but I'm not that loopy
;->...

What shall I do now? This is the end of an era.

A grand state funeral is in order ...

... I don't know.

RIP THE TINY TUBBY TROTTERS.