Now the Bank Holiday is over, Meg and I are looking forward to meeting up with our Waitrose friends in the cafeteria. What is interesting is this venue is not particularly easy for us to visit (one of us in a motorised scooter, another a 90 year old who has to judge what distance she can safely walk and, of course, Meg has to be pushed down (and up) the hill in her wheelchair.) But perhaps it is because the visit takes some commitment that we all make a great effort to see each other. If we have a fine autumn, then our various journeys can continue but if the weather suddenly turns very bad then this is, as the Spanish say 'otra causa' i.e. another thing altogether and we may have to rethink our plans. The staff who we have known for years always make us welcome and it is not uncommon for bunches of (soon to be out-of-date) flowers to be tossed in our direction.
After the hobby of model making with the Keil Kraft range of balsa wood aircraft, I developed a new interest when I was aged about 15 but I honestly cannot remember how I got this into the first place which was the breeding of hamsters. Together with a school friend, we developed our interest in common and were fortunate in that there was a friendly and eminent breeder of hamsters that we used to visit regularly in Harrogate. Hamsters are interesting little creatures but have some strange breeding habits. The females come into oestrus every fourth night on which occasions the female will mate but on the other three nights she and whatever male is in the vicinity will fight to the death. The gestation period is also incredibly short at about 16 days. After a litter has been produced, each hamster will require its own cage and at one stage, I was producing cage after cage - I think the grand total that I achieved was about 14. In the railway sidings of the suburb of Harrogate in which I lived, there seemed to be quite a supply of abandoned (or easily liberated) soda water syphon cases which were inevitably just about the right size. The only difficulty is that hamsters being rodents would easily chew their way through a normal wooden cage so each cafe needed protecting with a kind of tin strip. This was produced by taking the top and the bottom of a tin can, cutting it open with a pair of garden shears and then after some unrolling and re shaping cutting the result 'tin' into strips which were then tacked onto the relevant area of the cage. Although the keeping of hamsters does not sound an incredibly exciting activity in itself, my friend and I used to visit many of the small towns in the vicinity where we could take our hamsters along to be entered into a show. The show facilities were nearly always draughty Methodist halls with long rows of trestle tables inside. As a condition of entry into the show, the hamsters had to be housed within a standard show cage that were so designed that a judge could put two or three of such cages together in order to make comparisons of the animals within. The show cages themselves were housed in a special travelling box which would hold exactly two cages facing each other and this gave rise to an incident on a local train which sticks in our memory. The train conductor who inspected our tickets asked what was inside the boxes was told that they contained hamsters said they would have a special train ticket bought for them. My friend and I thought this was a tremendous joke and laughed and laughed until the ticket inspector wandered away. On his next journey down the train, the ticket inspector again requested payment and, once again, assuming that this was the most ridiculous joke we laughed and laughed until the inspector gave up. It was only afterwards that we came to appreciate that this was not intended to be a joke at all and he was absolutely in his rights to demand payment for their carriage but evidently felt he was no position to enforce the payment request. I was not very successful at hamster breeding and the most I ever achieved might have been a 'third class' or perhaps a 'Highly Commended' but that was the total amount of my success. My friend, though, visited the breeder on his own and secured an animal for about £2 which then went to secure a 'Best in Show' I felt at the time that this was not quite in the spirit of the show events but at least my friend and I got to explore some of the little towns in the vicinity of Harrogate and Leeds. The hamster breeding phase of my life only lasted a year or so and then I think GCSE 'O' levels intervened. We did have a sort of brick built shed at the rear of our house which housed the hamster cages in their heydey and I did branch out and acquire either one or two pigeons which I keep on the roof of the aforementioned shed. The father of a neighbouring boy had some racing pigeons but I do not think the pair I acquired showed that kind of class and I soon tired of them. I also acquired a rabbit that had the most beautiful purply-browny fur but the most vicious temper it is possible to imagine. When my sister's then boyfriend exclaimed that I had got a rare 'Australian Blue' or something similar, I generously made a gift of the rabbit to him and I was heartily glad to be shot of it as cuddly it most certainly was not. My mother and sister tolerated my animal husbandry with a sort of bemused indifference but I do remember that my mother was not best pleased that I insisted that my hamsters be fed an extremely expensive wheat germ mixture called 'BeMax' which I insisted was necessary to increase the fertility of my hamster collection. Wheat germ and an associated chemical called Spermidine do have manifest health benefits. Spermidine stimulates autophagy, enabling the body to clean out and recycle any unnecessary or damaged cells. This process has been linked to multiple potential health benefits, including fighting against cancer, Type 2 Diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease and is suggested to display anti-aging effects.
© Mike Hart [2024]