Pet Corner

Today's major event in the Kapitano household: Sidney has laid another egg.

That's how we discovered he's a girl. Sidney is one of our three parrots, a small round green senegalese affair with a maternal instinct that's not so much fierce as psychotic.

The probable father, and therefore probable male, is Percy - an african grey. Percy's chief talent is immitation - of telephones, smoke alarms, squeaking doors and people blowing their noses. That and certain phrases like "No!", "Get back in your cage!", "Stop that!" and "I said no!".

Sidney has been occasionaly producing eggs for around two years, and none have hatched. It seems unlikely to me that species so different could produce offspring.

The third parrot is Molly, a cockatiel of entirely ambigious gender. He/She was reputedly once part of a 'parrot circus', riding around on a skateboard. She's the tamest, happily sitting on people's shoulders and genteelly dunking bits of digestive biscuit in her water bowl.

For a few months we had Barney, a manically destructive bird who could brazenly attack stray cats. He (?) had a fascination for shiny reflective objects. We gave him an old metal teapot to keep him quiet - he spent hours muttering into it, the almost human speech sounds reverberating as though in a cave.

There was also Nancy, who has absolutely the loudest and most persistant squawk I've ever heard.

When I was very young, we had Fred, whose main occupation (when not escaping from his cage) was meticulously unhooking curtains from their tracks.

Over the years, we've had these six parrots and three dogs. During the two and a half years I lived with Stuart, he and I kept two fish - Mr Greedy and Mr Chatterbox. Mestopheles the concrete cat doesn't count.

There's a family of frogs that lives in the drains, snails that appear in the garden when it's wet, and mice that used to scratch inside the walls before we got ultrasonic repellents.

Oh, and there was a tabby cat known as Tiger that adopted my parents - and most of the street. Tiger was so butch he preferred dog food, which was okay, because our dogs preferred the cat food we bought for him.