During lockdown, my boy and I side-stepped the cockapoos and labradoodles and other needy creatures, and bought a tortoise. 

Cites certified. No longer common-place: Happily, the days when crate-loads were brought from sunny wild places to our damp gardens to die of our careless misunderstandings, belong in the past of my childhood, not in my son’s. 

We didn’t realise how terrifyingly tiny a nine-month-old tortoise was until, invited to choose him from among tortoise brothers and sisters, my boy picked him up to find he barely filled his hand.

I begged to call him ‘Zoom’ because he didn’t and at the time, everyone else did. 

Sensibly my boy put my joking aside. Observing that his shell looks like a World War soldier’s helmet and from that, understanding something of his nature, my boy named him ‘Trooper’. The naming of a tortoise, is every bit as grave a matter as the naming of cats.

If things turn out well, troop he will, through many years, maybe more than 50. Some tortoises live to 75. It is sobering to know that if we do this right, Trooper will easily outlive me and he could outlive us both. Me in my half-century, my boy in his 10 per cent.

My son didn’t miss the irony that I had said no, to an earlier offer of a baby gecko once I realised they live 15 years. “Oh but, the live crickets”, I said. 

Tortoises are vegetarian. Having clinched the deal and surprised that I had said yes at all let alone so quickly, my boy promised me he was ready for the life-long responsibility. Then he and I promised each other, solemnly, that we would remember to leave tortoise to our children in our wills.

Tortoise-housing being hard to come by in lockdown, we cajoled our handy neighbour to make a big ‘tortoise table’ and one exciting day, the most eventful in a long time, we brought the baby tortoise home. 

Trooper will grow to the size of a small melon, but for now he sits in the palm of my hand. His front legs are heroically spiked. He is a Spur-thighed Iberian. We have claimed him as Greek, though in truth his is a scattered turkish sort of wandering greek from further along. The sort that existed before nation-building Attaturk burned the greekness out of ancient trading cities. 

Moving in such a way with such a wiggle that his wrinkled graceless back legs remind me of the cutest chubby human baby-crawling, pushing onwards, from under the frilly rear of his shell. He walks on his claws as on tippy-toes, scratching and tickling our hands.

Waiting watchful, as time warms our blood like sunshine we are learning to live in tortoise-time.  As he warms his lash-less lids blink over poppy-seed eyes. Dark and shiny as oil. Looking at each other and nodding in tortoise greeting, we know we cannot cross into each other’s particular sort of time and space for long, but we are growing to understand each other well enough. 

Mostly he is slow and sleepy but when charged by solar power,  and motivated by an appetite for dandelion leaves and clover, he stretches out his wrinkly neck, and embarks on surprisingly speedy and resolute manoeuvres. If he can push his way through an obstacle, he will. If he can see the horizon he heads for it, with determination. 

Encased, his tough shell exposes his utter vulnerability. Pale green belly plastron, geometric shell embellished with green, gold and black scoots. Did you know that tortoises can feel through their shells, being both as tough and tender as human finger-nails in nail beds?

Lockdown made our own time race, and stand still. As our horizons widened to places we had never heard of before, we were not allowed more than a walk around the block. Confined together at home when we emerged we were like newborns, taking in big lungfuls of air. Suddenly all too conscious that breath becomes air becomes breath and in becoming breath becomes air all over again. 

When time slowed for me like this before, it came upon me quickly and caught me alone. This time, it came upon us all, and with more warning. On the last day before everything closed, me and my boy went and had our hair cut, and I carried home a disinfecting cleaning spray, a pack of polenta (Waitrose was clean out of pasta), and a four-pack of loo roll, not more so as not to look greedy, but enough. 

We were ready enough, and by now I knew how mundane catastrophe can be. 

The last time something like this happened, when I needed to find stillness in the middle of the storm, I would climb into my son’s bed and floating in the darkened room with a nightlight for the moon, we would cuddle as I read him bed time stories. Sweet two-and-a-half he delighted in reading the same stories over again and again. But later each night, alone in my own time, I stopped my childhood habit of reading the last page first and the thrill of reading ahead a little before placing the bookmark back a bit. I was scared and too agitated to concentrate on anything beyond the present racing moment. I stopped reading for myself, altogether. 

Seeing him so small then, chubby legs, walking on the tips of his toes, pushing himself forwards with a wiggle of his nappy, I knew I had to walk with him longer and further than his little footsteps could take him yet. He was far far from ready to walk his own way towards the horizon. I didn’t know if I could go with him but I did, one step at a time, one breath at a time, not planning beyond the next hospital appointment, not booking the next summer’s holiday, not organising teatime playdates beyond the next week of school. Until almost before I knew it, we were here eight years on and it was discombobulating that as the world grew bigger while rapidly contracting, I felt the relief of the familiar. 

I welcomed the simplification because it had become the only way I really know how to live. I was content again with my boy in our night-time boat, because in truth, I had never disembarked, never reached the shore. 

I thought how nice it might be to get a puppy so that all three of us could walk, and enthusiastically share a common purpose, but walking wasn’t that much fun when everything familiar had become strange because you had to swerve away from every other human and their nonsensically enthusiastic dog. Besides, at least one or two of the cats would probably have left home in a huff. 

So this time, when it came to the end of the everyday and the new was far from normal, I didn’t want to walk anywhere with anything.

I wanted to slow down every breath, every moment, and blink my dark eyes in the sun.

I wanted, knowing that the last page is there , not to skip ahead and read it yet, but simply read the story in between. I wanted to grow my own tortoise-shell, being so tender inside and learn to live in tortoise-time.

What I wanted, all along but didn’t know it, until my son pestered me a little during lockdown, was to know mortality and still to dare – to have a tortoise.