The other day, while working from home, I thought it would be a nice opportunity to give Lily’s pet rats a bit of a run around. I feel bad that they really only get one half-hour of relative freedom each week, which is when we clean their cage out.

So, I settled down with my laptop – turns out the wireless signal is perfectly fine in Lily’s room – sat down, closed the door of the room, and opened the door of the cage.

There are two doors on Snowy & Ellie’s cage – one on the side which opens to form a ramp, and the top of the cage which opens like a lid.

I opened the one that is easy for them to use, thinking I was doing a good thing. They didn’t come out. I don’t think Ellie even noticed. Snowy stuck her head out a couple of times, kind-of in a “ooh, someone’s left the door open” way, but didn’t properly venture out. Only when I opened the lid, which is how we usually say hello to them, did they mount an escape bid.

From that point on there was scampering and exploring. Snowy kept mainly to herself, either behind the drawers or under the bookshelf. At one point there was a major scrap under the bookshelf, which must have been tricky – even considering relative sizes, there isn’t much room under there.

Ellie was a bit more sociable and kept coming to explore what I was up to. I discovered that rats paws are even less helpful than cats paws on a laptop keyboard – their paws are small enough to press individual keys, which means that typos can suddenly appear in your code and she somehow managed to switch windows at one point. I focused on saving frequently and keeping her away from the “return” key…

These two pics show her trying to nibble the end of Lily’s magic stick (picked up near Aylesbury at new year), but being thwarted by my notepad sliding out from under her.

Sadly, Snowy disgraced herself. I heard a slight knocking sound coming from behind the drawers, and on investigating, discovered that she had decided to “trim” one of Lily’s toys. I told her she wasn’t helping her own PR given that she was already not-favourite because of the history of biteyness.

Turns out it was worse than we thought, the little bird belongs to Polly Pocket and is one of Lily’s favourites. And now it’s ruined.

Rocky would never have done that.