We have entered the season marked in our household by the battle of wits between human and tortoise. All spring, my husband (dexterous, resourceful, engineer) pours his ingenuity into trying to keep the four tortoises (prehistoric, pea-brained, no opposable thumbs) in the garden, while the tortoises, out of the greenhouse and warmed to a point where they are unnervingly speedy, FYI, do their utmost to escape. It makes no sense – here they have a spacious all-you-can-eat buffet; out there it’s cars, cats and chaos. But the reptile heart wants what it wants.
We’re already had one jailbreak by our worst recidivist. Despite double wooden sleepers corralling her and in defiance of all physical laws, she’s been apprehended previously trundling down the street, destination unknown; wedged, thwarted, under a gate, still fighting to free herself; and repeatedly in our neighbours’ garden, demolishing her summer-flowering annuals (sorry, J). We’ve tried a GPS tracker; she rubbed it off in minutes.
This time it happened on my (negligent) watch and was discovered on my husband’s return. He thinks she scaled a carelessly overlooked raspberry cane; I prefer to believe she has an outside accomplice and was helicoptered to freedom somehow. We searched for hours, then printed up flyers, fretting she was gone for good. Thankfully, a lady I handed one to had intel: she had been picked up on the run by a kindly neighbour in the street behind and taken to the local vet.
This resulted in a relieved but farcical hour of trying to prove she was ours: unable to locate her microchip number, I was left scrolling through my phone for a picture. I don’t take many, it turns out: of the handful it identified searching for “tortoise”, one was a pigeon and one a screenshot of me on a Zoom call – rude. I finally found a 2018 mugshot that showed her chipped shell clearly and we were allowed to reclaim her. She travelled home in the car footwell, every fibre of her being vibrating with “only sorry I got caught” energy. She’s in the garden now, plotting. Actually, she probably isn’t.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
