What a tortoise can teach us

‘Are you a dog or a cat person?’ It’s one of those questions that comes up eventually — in conversation, on Blind Date or during an Oxbridge interview. The theory is that either you like a dog’s boundless tumble of affection, or you respect the sleek independence of a cat, and explaining your choice reveals your personality. Well, I’m a tortoise person. I write this having recently acquired a tortoise. Little Daphne caught my eye from a tank in an Essex pet shop, where she was surrounded by other one-year-old tortoises busy burrowing away. Daphne stopped, turned her wrinkled neck and looked straight at me before coolly yawning. I knew then that she was the one. Having lived with Daphne for a couple of months, I’ve been struck by her idiosyncrasies and wonder if she can’t teach us all a thing or two. Here are five lessons from my tortoise:    1. Go slow Aesop spotted this one. When you spend all day with a tortoise, it really is astonishing to see how slow they are, plodding along, often pausing mid-stride to blink and peer into the distance, and falling asleep several times a day. The mid-stride pause strikes me as especially pertinent. Perhaps Daphne is catching her breath, but there seems to be something inescapably philosophical about the way she looks around with each step. Compare this to us, always in a rush, swigging coffee and tapping out emails as we hurry along, not bothering to look where we’re going. Daphne’s wanderings are full of the pleasure of treading carefully and looking at the world as you go.    2. Burrow and climb Daphne is a Horsefield tortoise, a breed that loves to burrow and can manage astonishing feats of climbing. Once, sitting at my desk with a blanket wrapped around me and an end hanging loose off the chair, I looked around for Daphne only to see her a foot off the ground, hauling herself up the blanket with dizzying determination.