WHOEVER said you should never work with children or animals didn’t have much to complain about. He should have tried living with them – both, at the same time.

Because once you have one, you tend to get the other. “Muuuum. Can we have a cat? I want a dog. All my friends have a hamster. Guinea pigs are just so cute. Sophie has got a snake. Why can’t we bring a seal home? It could live in the bath.”

My children are regularly pleading for little balls of fluff or blobs of slime they can call their own. Tame, wild, cute or ugly, it doesn’t matter.

They will look after it, they tell you.

They will feed it, walk it and clean out its cage. And they do, for about a week.

Then they ignore it and, eventually, forget about it. And then it’s over to me. Because, somehow, even though I never applied for it and have none of the necessary skills or experience, I have been awarded the job of chief zookeeper. We have had countless goldfish, which, no matter how hard I try, always end up suffering an untimely death.

The creepy stick insects, which I reluctantly fed, watered and cleaned up after every week, eventually escaped from their cage. I had to free the slugs, snails and various insects I discovered living in a makeshift miniature wildlife park our then sixyear- old had constructed out of cardboard boxes and sticky tape under his bed.

We almost lost our hamster, Max, on day one when he ate his way out of his cardboard box carrier on the way home from the pet shop. After that, our little Houdini regularly escaped from his cage, hiding out, sometimes for a week at a time, behind the cooker or fridge or under floorboards, only emerging in the dead of night to maul favourite teddy bears or cushions, while I frantically tried to hunt him down.

Once the novelty had worn off, and the children started to ignore him, I lent him to a friend whose daughter had always wanted a hamster. “Just keep him for a month or so and let’s see if anyone notices he’s gone,” I said. Three months later and no one had missed Max. Not a mention. So I told her to keep him.

The one pet that has stood the test of time is our cat, Hermione. But although the boys, who got her when she was a tiny kitten, love stroking and cuddling and making a fuss of her, when the going gets tough, they call me in.

It is me who gets up at 5am when she pleads to be let out, because she refuses to use her cat flap. And the boys shout for me when she brings a dead mouse or rabbit, which she has usually decapitated first, into the house and deposits it on the kitchen floor.

Which brings me to last week, and the question my husband must have regretted asking the moment he uttered it. “Did I have a good journey?

Did I have a good journey?” I replied, slightly hysterically, my voice rising with every word.

I had just been stuck in the car for an hour-and-a-half, along with all the children and a nervous Hermoine, who I had had to force, spitting and hissing, into her wire cat cage, which she hates.

One minute I was driving along in heavy traffic, listening to Radio Four. The next, I had a vomiting cat, in its wire cat basket, thrust onto my lap, while a howling, retching teenager demanded I stop the car now because he was covered in cat sick. And it was clearly all my fault.

Then, when I finally pulled over and gave one of the other boys the cat, ordering him to hold onto it for dear life, while I cleaned out the cage and mopped everything up, she leapt out of his arms and escaped next to the busy road, about an hour away from home.

Just as I was panicking about never being able to find her, and Albert started crying inconsolably, bawling that his cat would be killed, someone came over and told us they had seen it climbing up underneath our car.

Then I spent half an hour, along with a few helpful bystanders – and thanks to all of you – lying flat on my back under the car trying to coax her out from her hiding place amongst all the dirty hot metal. She survived the ordeal. But just think what would have happened if I’d driven off?

“Next time,” I told my husband.

“You’re taking the cat.”

Safely back home, I have just about recovered from the journey.

For the boys, however, it wasn’t that big a deal.

One of them is already asking for a puppy for Christmas. Another of them wants a horse. “Don’t tell me,”

I say. “You are going to look after them and I won’t have to do a thing...”