I THINK I mentioned a few months ago that the rest of us in the house had poo-pooed my daughter's insistence that six little black things she had found in the stick insects' home were stick insect eggs.

We all laughed, well I did, and suggested one or two ideas as to what they really were (which is where the poo poo came in).

Nevertheless, she popped them into a jam jar and put them on the window ledge.

What I didn't confess to was that a week or so later I completely forgot that the jam jar possibly contained the next generation of twigs and rinsed it out with Fairy Liquid to pot up yet another batch of rhubarb and raspberry jam. Well you know what it's like when you're jam making, any container goes. And having carefully collected jam jars all through the winter you have already discovered that the mad recycler has been at your secret store and they are now residing somewhere on Caradon Council's glass mountain.

Come to think of it, I hope I rinsed out the jar - although with all those pips nobody would notice if I hadn't.

The would-be parents of the eggs had, within a week or so, turned up their little woody toes and gone to meet their maker. Or so we thought. It's a bit difficult to spot a live stick insect in a container filled with ivy and twigs which aren't posing as insects. We assumed they had either died and turned rapidly to sawdust or had somehow got out. Or one of us had been a little bit too close with the vacuum cleaner. Either way, there was a weeping and wailing about the house for a day or two because Julian, Clarissa and Marcus had snuffed it.

Rule number one in my book is never give anything that isn't warm blooded or has fur a pet name. A rule which was broken many a time when the children were small, hence the row of little fishy graves in the garden marked with lolly sticks.

I'm afraid I could never warm to stick insects really. I like pets which greet me at the door, show at least a modicum of gratitude for all the tins and packets of food I lug home and occasionally deign to sit on my knee. Talents no stick insect I have ever met possess.

I suppose they're no real trouble, except when one got out and there was a general cry of 'don't come in the room the stick insects are out' and you heard a horrid crunchy sound under the one foot you had just put into the room and prayed it was a piece of corn flake.

Anyway, after the longest introduction in the world, I'll get to the point. I mocked when they told me the stick insects had laid eggs. Now I have to take it all back because at the bottom of the stick insect container which had lain slightly mouldering in some far corner of a foreign field - ie the garage - has been discovered not one, not two, but 47 baby stick insects. Their six little companions may or may not be floating around in a jar of preserves but they have come through and there may be more.

Oh goody, isn't that wonderful? A whole farmyard of the things.

I did suggest they looked more like ants and was then rewarded with one being thrust into my eyeball on the end of a leaf by an excited granddaughter until I agreed that they did indeed look like little stick insects.

The children are ecstatic. They are all being given names, all 47 of them, and counted each day to see if there are more. My granddaughter is obsessed with giving things names, she even named the six tomato plants I gave her in the summer and I was frequently forced to yell 'You've forgotten to water Roger and Angela again', yet more proof to the neighbours that something is amiss in our household.

I suppose there is some benefit to stick insects. One, they don't need much food. Two, they don't need taking for walks, a task which always eventually falls to the adults, and three they don't need mucking out, or not much. Fourthly, they answer the need in small children to have pets, and if it wasn't stick insects I fear it might be something worse. Like slugs, or newts, or a small innocent looking tin which Nanny found on her bookshelf one day and which when opened revealed the corpses of about 100 woodlice. 'I wondered what happened to that', said the culprit.

Little children have no fear of insects, unlike a lot of adults. We put the fear into them, by shrieking every time a wasp flies near or a moth lands on us. My father was reputed to have fainted when a large black spider fell on him when he was wallpapering the ceiling. He was a big man, he'd been a fireman throughout the London blitz so could be said to have had not a little courage, yet show him a spider and he went white and left home. My grandson happily picks up what he called 'liddle creaters' in the garden and runs up to show me and I have to steel myself to admire something slithery and wriggling and tell him calmly to take it back to its Mummy because its getting cold and Nanny doesn't really want to give it a cuddle.

One of my favourite books has always been Gerald Durrell's 'My family and other animals'. As a child he was fascinated by all living creatures. As a man he was a famous zoologist and zoo owner. In between he had a long suffering family who would find snakes in the bath and magpies eating their dinner. His mother must have been a saint, but then mothers often are when it comes to pets. I inflicted a ferret called Margaret on my poor mother, hiding it for a week in my bedroom until my grandmother went in to change the bedding and emerged with Margaret firmly fixed to her fingers. Even then I was allowed to keep the ferret providing I kept her in the shed, but sadly she was a master escape artist and took several more chunks out of my grandmother who eventually said either the ferret went or she would. Lucky for her my father was away at the time, or it might have been a different story, but the ferret went to a new home.

Stick insects, I suppose, are not likely to be found attaching themselves to parts of your anatomy nor jumping off the top of the curtain onto your head (pet rat, circa 1952). Mind you, 47 of them could do a bit of ganging up, so the situation has to be carefully monitored.