Three cats:

- Chloe (very old and almost toothless lilac tortie longhair who purrs almost all the time, but wheezes like she's worn out the clutch in her purr transmission)

- Marblecake (13 year old shorthair tabby who likes nothing better than to sit on the bed and be stroked while purring and drooling huge puddles onto the duvet)

- Ollie (her son, 11, born on our bed, ginger shorthair; goes out a lot to do Bloke Things around the block, the only one of our cats who still bothers to go outside)

Ollie and his mother have been arguing continuously since he was weaned and regularly get into scraps - they both cuddle up with Chloe but never together.

They got some catnip for Christmas. The one it most affected was Marblecake, who rolled around the floor in ecstasy while Ollie looked on as if thinking "oh god, Mother's on the gin again".

We had a succession of rats while Marion's kids were at home.

My brother had a neat choice of pet when he was a student in NZ - two peripatuses in a terrarium. But they didn't last long, it looked like one of them ate the other and then died itself. They're lovely little things with utterly disgusting feeding habits.