This week, I bring you a reader request. A chap I ran into complained of failing to find an article I wrote in 2010. I immediately knew which he was referring to. You kid yourself in hackery that - when people tell you they loved something of yours - it will be the op-ed that ended up on undergraduate philosophy course, or item of satire so coruscating it changed how people behaved. But, in the end, they only ever want the piece about the time you took a ferret to Mahiki.
What can I say? The Noughties were a curious decade; trends a less fleeting, more hardcore affair. It wasn’t a case of Brat Summer getting its fifteen minutes before everyone puts their bras back on and turns demure. We invested. Here I am, living the dream. Breton stripes, check; Mulberry bag, obv; four-inch velvet evening sandals to take a weasel for a walk, naturellement.
I give you, a trend piece from when trends were trends, meaning questing north, sourcing a feral companion, and losing your coloured Wayfarers in the process…
Ferreting out the latest pet trend
Madonna and Paris Hilton adore them, but could Hannah Betts hold her nose to take a ferret to tea at Claridge’s?
[The Times, April 19th, 2010]
It is not often that one’s career in hackery makes one literally sick, but — behold — here I am puking into a flower bed, while the instigator of said spewing claws sadistically at my thigh. What had led me to such a pass, how did this villain end up a close personal friend of David Furnish, and why was I operating from beneath a pall as dense as Icelandic volcano ash?
My tale begins with recent revelations that the South can now claim supremacy over the North in terms of ferret ownership. For these unprepossessing furballs are all the rage, with one and a half million lurking in (or outside) the nation’s homes. Madonna’s got one, Jonathan Ross has one, and Paris Hilton has been photographed snogging hers by some bins, as one might some nightclub conquest. So fashion forward is Mr Mustela putorius furo that Burberry was forced to sue a pet company that was seeking to deck out our furry friends in check.
As ever, I take news of a breaking vogue as a personal challenge, deciding to acquire my own southern nancy ferret and make him a mammal about town. It was at this point that the whole Estuary ferret mythos began to break down. For 48 hours, I scoured the capital and its surrounds for my new best friend. Not a whisker. Fostering a ferret would appear to be a good deal more complicated than adopting a child.
Thus it was that I found myself on the train to Chesterfield, seat of James McKay, ferret whisperer and author of the seminal Complete Guide to Ferrets. McKay explained that all 100 of his animals are currently “on honeymoon”, aka rutting for England, hence the bloodcurdling screams and the acrid wall of musk being emitted by their rear ends to indicate that they are up for it.
Most up for it was my new companion, the aptly named Roger, an über-modish blue roan in his prime at 5. Girl ferrets, jills, wither and die if they do not score sufficient sex, so Rog, who has cunningly equipped himself with a vasectomy, is Jack the lad-in-chief. So charitable has he been of late that he has “lost condition”. It is my job to restore this prizefighter to form.
Not only is Rog a super-stud, he is also “well handled”; that is, is unlikely to gnaw off my arm. I am to hold him loosely so that he doesn’t mistake me for a predator, not allow him near my face as he will consider us to be fronting up (bad, Paris), and remain nonchalant if he does a war dance. I move in for a stroke. “Don’t, or you will stink all the way back to London,” counsels McKay. Naively, I imagine this to have the status of ribbing the new girl (as I type this, I find myself overwhelmed by hollow laughter).
Studying the McKay tome on the way home, I learn that alternative names for the ferret are “stinkmart” and “foulmarten”, monikers evidenced by the exodus of fellow travellers around us (also attributable to the Hammer House of Horror clawing sounds emanating from Roger’s box). On arrival at St Pancras, the cage-face proximity necessitated by transporting my charge almost causes me to topple down an escalator. I consider leaving him in a cab, but the driver sees me, or rather smells me, coming.