I blame my tremendous lack of knowledge of flora and fauna on my primary school not having pets you could take home for the weekend.

I would hear of people taking the class hamster home on a Friday night.  Not me, or any members of my class; we had to make do with imaginary pets.  One class member had an imaginary dodo for the weekend – turned up on Monday saying human hunters had killed it.  Life was tough on some Balham streets where no human had been before.

I so wanted a guinea pig to look after for a few days – to see if they made that odd noise when you held them up.  I had no siblings, so couldn’t experiment on them to see if they emitted the same sound.

No one in our class would come in after the weekend with tales of what the class gerbil had done; the “show and tell” table was pitiful.  The nearest we got to having a class pet was a pine cone which resembled a hedgehog.

As a child growing up in sixties London I never heard the sound of a tiny wheel being run on; no coming in Monday smelling of hay (or worse) and no revelations that the class chinchilla had escaped from my flat, ran eight floors to the top of the building shouting “Top of the world, ma”.