We adopted Darwin, a 21-year-old Greek tortoise, on a whim. It was 2024. His original owners were no longer able to provide proper care, so a concerned family member (and friend of ours) brought this football-sized wriggling reptile down on the train from Glasgow to London in a bucket.
The friend offered Darwin to my then boyfriend, Jacob, who knew nothing about tortoises and everything about spontaneity. I agreed to help foster him, begrudgingly, as long as Jacob would do “all the work”. I also didn’t think “all the work” would be that much work. How high-maintenance could a tortoise really be?
