WE'VE recently acquired three new pets, at least I think there are three. You can't really tell with stick insects.

On a scale of one to a hundred in the most boring insect in the world stakes, I think stick insects score about 99 and actually I can't think of one which might make the top score.

There are, however, several benefits. For a start, they don't need anyone to go out on a frosty morning and find food for them. Secondly, they don't need mucking out very often because I would presume stick insects can go a whole year without their droppings becoming too anti-social.

And thirdly if one of them dies you can always drop in the odd twig and pretend that stick insect number three is having its annual hibernation period and yes, you swear you saw it move yesterday. Failing that, a desiccated Daddy Longlegs would do just as well.

These three considerations are important because as every parent knows every child in the world swears they will clean out whatever pet you let them have, will feed it regularly and yes, they do understand that guinea pig heaven is just around the corner.

And of course they do none of these things. Which is why you end up with a garden full of tiny little graves set with matchstick crosses and an anguished child shrieks in your ear every time you try to weed 'don't touch that that's Hammy Hamster the Fourteenth's final resting place.' And that's why you can be found lurking in hedgerows at 7am before you go to work trying to find enough greenery for the 14 baby rabbits to have a decent breakfast.

I drove my poor mother completely crazy with pets. I wasn't satisfied with just our cat and a half share in a pony. I wanted other pets and I soon discovered that people who knew I liked animals could be amazingly generous. They would, for instance, hand over not just a nice Flemish giant cross rabbit but give me the cage and run as well. It never occurred to me that they might be only too glad to find a sucker who actually liked a rabbit whose main aim in life was to bite the hand which fed it and had a kick like Arnold Swartenzenneger.

Then there was Harvey, a white rabbit named after a rabbit in a film of the same name. Harvey also came with a cage although he never stayed in it long. He was the Houdini of the rabbit world and could get out of anything. He would then seek out the neighbour's most succulent vegetables and we grew used to thunderous knocks on the door.

Next to Harvey's empty cage was a small black rabbit whose owners had moved to a town and who had asked me to look after her until they could find a new home. Within weeks she produced a litter of eight, pointing to the fact that Harvey could not only break out of cages but was pretty good at breaking in when the mood took him. We never heard from the owners again.

At various times I had not just the rabbits but a ferret, another gift, several tame pigeons and white mice. My mother cracked over the mice, which bred at an alarming rate and infested the shed. I'm sure she must have been tempted at times to lock the cats in the shed with the mice and the pigeons and set the ferret on the rabbits. She didn't, but we had ongoing rows over cleaning, feeding and various pet duties.

Retribution comes with your own children of course and in my case it was hamsters.

I don't wish to be unpleasant but to my mind hamsters have only one aim in life and that is to die at the most inconvenient time possible. There you are, all ready to go on holiday, suitcases packed, car revving up and a friend or neighbour quite happy to take the hamster off your hands for two weeks when the thing turns up its little toes and pegs it.

So you are faced with having to have a hasty tear-soaked funeral in the flower bed and a car full of weeping children sobbing over all the dear departed pet's sweet little habits. None of which you can remember having witnessed.

And if they don't die they have an alarming habit of hibernating so you're not sure if they are dead or not and end up either keeping a watch to see if the rapidly stiffening corpse is not gone but merely sleeping or risk poking it with your finger and getting a nasty bite from a very bad tempered hamster which has been woken up six weeks early. To this day my elder daughter, now in her late thirties, swears we buried a hibernating hamster, even though I constantly assure her that it was a stiff as a poker and slightly smelly when we dropped it into its velvet lined matchbox. The velvet part having come from one of my evening tops which I found one day full of large, funeral sized holes, proof that it had been utilised as a shroud more than once.

That any hamsters lived at all was a miracle, as one of the cat's main aims in life was to eat what it considered was a nice little pre-packed snack and would launch itself like a battering ram at the cage at every opportunity. Finally the only place the cage was safe was on top of my wardrobe. Just you try to get the smell of hamster pee out of your winter coats.

We had goldfish of course, which also died eventually and let me tell you here and now if a goldfish dies when you have children it isn't a good idea to give it to the cat who will almost certainly let you down badly by producing it for inspection at an inopportune moment. And no, I'm not heartless. I did once give a goldfish, found frozen in the pond, the kiss of life and bring it back from a watery grave. And I sat up all night with a sick guinea pig dropping tiny sips of brandy into its mouth.

One of the most memorable pets we had was a large white cockerel we were supposed to be looking after for the school holidays. Never trust a school which asks you to look after one of its pets, especially if they send your child home with a small fluffy juvenile hen which in next to no time turns into a stroppy cockerel and which they then deny all knowledge of.

Our cockerel had a nifty line in flying judo leaps with extended claws at people it considered to be trespassers (everybody), drank beer and loved crisps, terrorised the dog and enjoyed nothing more than sitting on my shoulder so that I looked like Long John Silver with an albino parrot.

All in all I suppose now I'm in the next generation of pets, two cats and three (possibly) stick insects are not too bad. At least the latter won't take up too much room in the vegetable garden when they finally turn up their little woody toes.