Cuddles the Caterpillar

While on holiday at the Barend Holiday Village near Dumfries in Scotland - with my parents' friends Kath and Alan, and their daughter Helen - we became obsessed with a furry caterpillar named Cuddles, who we'd found crawling on heather during a walk on the moors.

Cuddles soon went everywhere with the three of us, although ultimately he was Helen's pet. Our parents found this a little disgusting, but were presumably happy for us to have a hobby. Alas, Cuddles came to a tragic end when Helen decided it was bath time, and the poor creature was drowned in the kitchen sink. Inspired by the new Robin of Sherwood tv-series (played by Michael Praed, of whom we had a poster in our attic room, from Smash Hits), we went out onto the balcony at the top of the house and threw the corpse of Cuddles in the air. Wherever he landed, was where he would be buried.

It transpired, when we went to bury him, that we would have been better off taking our inspiraton from the Jesus story, as Cuddles had been restored to life and was desperately making a break for it. We did not seem much saddened by his drowning-and-high-impact treatment, as Helen kept him and took him home at the end of the holiday.

We had a strange relationship with animals on these holidays to Barend. Another time we filled the wastepaper bin with water and rocks and captured ten or twenty toads from the loch and kept them in the bin out on our balcony - an idea that backfired when they started jumping around and laying toad-spawn everywhere. One such toad had a graze on his forehead so we named him Little Gash and took him everywhere with us, although Aunt Kath refused our appeal to put some savlon and a plaster on him.

We also captured buckets full of tiny little prawns from what was - on reflection - a pool at the end of a waste water draininge pipe on the beach, and then took them home and made Uncle Alan cook them for us (although we could not bring ourselves to eat them, Alan made short work of the plate).

[Time: Summer of 1984 or 1985]