Unfortunately we have no actual pets now - I used to have two guinea pigs called Floche (pronounced Flodge) and GP, but unfortunately they are in the Spirit World now. Mind you, they lived to 7 and 8 respectively, which is pretty old for guinea pigs. I see a guinea pig year as being a tenth of a human year, so you could say that they were the equivalent of 70 and 80 year old humans when they died, which is pretty good I say.
However, we do now have a hedgehog in our garden that has visited every night for the past few weeks. We first found some of his little 'messages' on our front porch, and then the next day we found one or two in our back garden (he had climbed over our front gate and into the back garden, as hedgehogs can roll themselves up into a ball when preparing to descend a drop so that they just bounce when they land). A few days later we saw him for the first time snuffling about one of our flowerbeds! We then bought some hedgehog pellets to put out for him and this has encouraged him to stay - we now see him every evening out on our patio crunching up the piles of pellets we put down for him. We call him Shadow (mainly due to the fact that he travels like a shadow through our flowerbeds because we never see him disturb the plants when he moves through but also of course due to the Sonic reference). We've never had a hedgehog stay this long before in our garden and we hope he stays as long as possible, as while he's in our garden, he's as safe as houses.
