Saturday 15th July 2000
Ebony the Hamster reports on one of his owners' recent birthdays

Lee celebrated his fortieth birthday just recently. Well, when I say 'celebrated', I use that word in a very loose way cos both our owners aren't normally in the habit of throwing wild parties and having guests round. More often than not, they sit down with a special meal and open a bottle of wine and put some tasty morsel in our cages that we don't normally see for three hundred and sixty-four days of the year.

But apparently, so Lee tells me (and I'm never altogether sure whether this he's telling me the absolute truth or not), the fortieth year of a human represents a major turning point in a great many lives because, when the counter clicks over, doubts and anxiety are supposed to descend upon them come the morning when day one of year forty begins.

Why? Not sure, really, but I think it has something to do with being over halfway through the average age for a human and being closer to the end of one's life than one was at the beginning.

Of course, such problems face hamsters at the end of about a year even though we tend not to pay it too much attention. Humans, however, seem to use the big four-zero as a special time for anxious considerations like:

'Why are the quantities of hair down the plughole increasing when I wash my hair?'

'Why has growth stopped vertically and is now only lateral?'

and, perhaps even more perplexing:

'Why is all the wisdom I need only acquired the moment after I needed it?'

Lee has been wholly different to many of the other humans I've witnessed, though. Although he's been noticing the occurrence of the first statement with increasing regularity, he hasn't grown overly worried about it and, to the second, has opted to buy larger and larger shirts in the clothes shops while informing the salesperson that he hopes that these don't shrink like the last ones did.

If anyone knows Lee - and there are a great many people who have met him once - you would have thought that, by now, the experiences he'd been through would have caused him to be a great source of all wisdom. But, such are the situations that he finds himself in that Lee can honestly say that no two have ever been the same and that, one day, if one ever recurs, he might well have forgotten by that time what he did on the first occasion.

But a midlife crisis? No, that's not Lee. And that's not for us hamsters, either. I guess that's the one good thing about living here - all of us are forever looking forward to what excitement each day will bring rather than to concern ourselves with what's inevitable sooner or later.

After all, both our owners have already dealt with that scenario...

Ebony the Hamster writes for the Rodent Weekly.
This article appears courtesy of that paper.




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