If he wasn’t biting toes or fouling the bath, he’d be flailing around on his back, waiting for someone to flip him over. He was even picky about his lettuce …
We adopted Darwin, a 21-year-old Greek tortoise, on a whim. It was 2024. His original owners were no longer able to provide proper care, so a concerned family member (and friend of ours) brought this football-sized wriggling reptile down on the train from Glasgow to London in a bucket.
The friend offered Darwin to my then boyfriend, Jacob, who knew nothing about tortoises and everything about spontaneity. I agreed to help foster him, begrudgingly, as long as Jacob would do “all the work”. I also didn’t think “all the work” would be that much work. How high-maintenance could a tortoise really be?
After we took Darwin back to our flat in an old cardboard box, it became immediately clear that he was, actually, a lot of work. A real piece of work, to be honest. He bit toes. He defecated and urinated endlessly, and everywhere. He climbed everything he could get his claws on (backpacks, bookshelves, potted cacti). This posed a significant health risk because if a tortoise flips over, it can be fatal. But that didn’t stop Darwin! He flipped regularly, and with aplomb.
Sometimes we’d come home to find him on his back, his little legs flailing, in the middle of an empty space with no nearby object from which he could have flipped. He also needed weekly “soaks” (half-hour baths) in the communal bathroom, during which he would often relieve himself, much to the delight of our housemates.
Looking after Darwin was like having a trial run at raising a child (something I once said to a new mother, who looked at me as if she wanted to kill me). I worried about him constantly. I threw money at him, spending silly amounts at bougie greengrocers buying cavolo nero, radicchio and endive, only for him to turn up his nose at them. We spent hundreds on X-rays and vet visits because of a bone disease problem.
Whenever I took a break from worrying about his bones and his diet, I had so much fun with him. Some of my favourite memories are our trips to Hackney Downs, the local park, where we’d take him out of his cardboard box, tie a red ribbon to his shell so he wouldn’t blend into the grass and let him roam about to feast on dandelions. Kids loved him. Adults found it hilarious.
Jacob and I went our separate ways in late 2025. Darwin lives with him in a lovely house with his own garden – a better choice than my poky flat, as much as it pains me. I still think about him every time I walk past dandelions.
He taught me so much about myself. I never realised what a helicopter parent I was until I took care of him – but I also discovered a newfound patience, and an unexpected, endless well of love for a being that was essentially a sentient rock.