WHEN I was a boy there was a bit of a craze for having tortoises as pets. I realise that you shouldn’t, of course, keep tortoises as pets but the 1960s were another universe where they did things differently.

I reckon the tortoise trend came from the TV programme Blue Peter’s tortoise Fred, later due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control, (including Fred’s) named Freda.

I remember vividly the day they painted Fred’s name on his shell and then a few months later put an ‘A’ at the end of Fred.

The one thing that did confuse me was the way they said Fred / Freda was a ‘tortus’ rather than a ‘toytoyse’ which is what we call it round here.

Me and my mates discussed this at school and decided that a tortus was just a different kind of toytoyse; maybe the shell was thicker, or something.

So of course I wanted a tortoise as a pet and of course I wept and blubbered and had tantrums and promised to be a good boy until my parents relented and got me one.

One day it wasn’t there, and the next day it was there, on the kitchen floor, looking round like a living pie with a really hard crust.

I thought long and hard about what to call it and in the end, after a lot of list-making in my red exercise book, I decided on Lurch, because I was a big Addams Family fan and the tortoise seemed to lurch a bit as it walked along, probably with the excitement of living in Darfield.

To be honest, as with a lot of pets, getting the pet was the most exciting bit of the pet experience. The pet arrives with a great fanfare.

The pet is all you ever wanted and you will now be the happiest person who ever lived, ever. And then the metaphorical or real sheen wears off and the fact is you’ve got a pet that needs looking after and so it just becomes the pet. Ah, the pet. The Pet. The flipping pet.

Some pets, of course, hold on to their novelty because they can do things. Cats chase stuff. Dogs chase stuff.

Mice run around. Tortoises just lurch around being tortoises and the only trick they can do it to yawn spectacularly. Well, that was Lurch’s only trick.

Somebody told me that tortoises could live for more than a hundred years and I tried to imagine Lurch wandering around the garden far into the next century, bearing in mind that all this was happening in the last century, if you get my drift.

Ah yes, the garden. My dad had built Lurch a little run in the back garden and he would stroll around that to its heart’s content.

That’s Lurch, not my dad. Lurch seemed set for the next hundred years, not taking up too much space, not bothering anybody, enjoying those delicious lettuce leaves.

And then one day, using an agility and cunning we never knew it possessed, Lurch disappeared. It was my fault, I confess, although I didn’t admit it at the time. I’d let Lurch out of the run into the wider and, as far as Lurch was concerned, infinite universe of the rest of the garden.

Then I suddenly fancied a Bar Six (if you don’t remember a Bar Six they were one of the most delightful chocolate treats you could ever have and put it this way, they were better than a Summit) and went into the house to raid the biscuit tin and when I got back Lurch had gone.

As a theoretical physicist might put it, there was a Lurch-shaped hole in the available Lurch-space. Not there were theoretical physicists in Darfield, not since Einstein moved to Gilroyd.

I reasoned that, because tortoises don’t move very quickly, Lurch wouldn’t have got very far. I glanced over the fence into Mr. Page’s garden and there was no sign. No sign at the other side, in Mr White’s garden.

At the front the pavement was empty of Lurch and there was a lack of lurch at the back where the garages were. No Lurch is bad news, as the saying almost goes.

And that was it, as far as Lurch was concerned. Or was it? Or rather, Or is it? As I said, tortoises can live for a hundred years, and it’s only about sixty years since it strolled away. I’ve moved house since then but I’m still in Darfield.

And one day I reckon I’ll see Lurch lurching down the road with some grand stories to tell.