I used to own a striped hamster. It was grey with black stripes, and very small. I named it Boomie.

My sister had recently reached puberty and decided to shun me. I was looking forward to lots of cuddling, cups of hot chocolate and girly chat with my new sibling, the hamster.

The hamster hated to be touched. It wasn’t fond of humans.

For three days, I stared into its cage, waiting for it to come out of its hamster abode. It didn’t. I picked up the hamster abode and shook it. The hamster fell out and, outraged, crawled into the straw. I dug it out and stared at it. In the adjoining bathroom, I could hear my sister singing ‘Like A Prayer’. As usual, she was beautifying her fringe with nail scissors. It was starting to resemble a patch of orange golf lawn.

‘Why won’t you be my friend’, I lisped quietly at the hamster, ensuring my sister couldn’t overhear my childish whining.

The hamster glared back. I smiled and gently stroked its minuscule whiskers. It bit my finger.

Eventually I got bored and parked its cage in the laundry. I was sick of the squeaking noise the little exercise wheel made all night long. Three days later, the hamster died of hamster pneumonia.

‘The condensation in the laundry, particularly the drier’, the vet declared. I cried some. I was happy the thing was dead. Because it was boring. But I cried to convince my parents I wasn’t a heartless child and prevent them returning me to the hospital, where, to my knowledge, children were made.

Moved by my tears, my parents went and bought a new stripy hamster.

‘Great,' I said to my mother, smiling soullessly. 'Is there any chance I could, um, have a dog instead?’ I asked.

‘You have a dog. His name is Asti,’ my mother replied.

I had forgotten about Asti. He wasn’t interested in children, since he was gay and from France, and overly concerned with sleeping by the heater, flirting with the neighbour’s poodle and stealing Brie from the fridge.

The new hamster moved into Boomie’s old home. I named it Boomie II. Less enthusiastic this time round, I sat by its cage, I poked my finger through the iron bars and, no hamster in sight, mused about the hamster's entrapment. I thought how, to the hamster, I probably looked like a giant, given that the hamster was hardly bigger than my nose. Feeling sad, and as always daydreaming about being a famous child poet, I applied Rilke’s The Panther to the hamster's fate. I fetched my diary. The Hamster, I wrote. ‘To him, the world is just bars…’. I gave up when I struggled with waxing lyrical about the exercise wheel.

Eager to connect with Boomie II, I went to pottery class and created a little hamster playground. It consisted of a turd-shaped lump of clay, which I perforated with hamster-sized holes. For the hamster to crawl through. For two days I protected my hand with my dad’s skiing glove, picked up Boomie II and attempted to poke his head into one of the hamster holes.

‘Crawl through the hole,’ I ordered. The hamster screeched and squealed. He wriggled and bit. He didn’t want to revel in the hamster-turd. On the third day, I moved him into the laundry. Three days later, Boomie II showed signs of Hamster pneumonia.

‘You have to take him out of the laundry,’ the vet said. My mother stared at me. She was busy re-assessing her feelings towards her daughter, who had, as it turned out, attempted to commit hamster-cide.

‘Ok,’ I said.

Following the vet’s instructions, my mother and I went to purchase, for the price of a Porsche, an infra-red warming light for the hamster. At night, I couldn’t sleep, because my room was basked in a dark, bloody red light, and I could see the hamster’s little eyes flash yellow at me as he exercised his dying body in his hamster wheel. ‘Sqeak… squeak… squeak’. The Kafkaesque suffering of the Hamster proved too much for my 9 year old brain.

I ran into my sister’s adjoining room and crawled in to her bed. Sticking to the rules of co-sleeping, I placed my head next to her stinking pubescent feet and tried not to rub my feet together to induce sleep (I suffer from restless leg syndrome).

I awoke to find the hamster alive and kicking.

The week after, we all crawled into the old Volvo and drove to France. Asti barked at the passing motorcycles. They offended his gay French cultural sensitivities.

My grandma had been asked to look after the hamster. For the purpose, she moved into our family home for the duration of our holidays.

When we returned, the hamster was dead.

Cradling me in her arms, my grandma explained that he had passed away peacefully in his sleep of an unknown hamster malaise. Working hard to shape my face into a grief-stricken frown, I detected an evil glint in her eyes as she told me this obvious fib.

‘Grandma,’ I whispered. ‘did you move him into the laundry?’

‘I did’, she whispered back. ‘The squeaking of the little wheel was driving me mad. Would it make you feel any better if I got you a new one?’

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