No Flowers for Algernon

hamsters, hippies and the cage of freedom

Like all the best poems, this one is hiding an extremely complex narrative. Mine involves two love triangles, a hippie, a hamster and possibly a sparrowhawk or some kind of owl.

Algernon

I gave him to my friend
He was my friend then
I thought he was the best choice
I should have seen it coming

We had argued vaguely
Over candlelight and empty bottles
That keeping him in a cage
Was the worst thing I could do

“He was born in a cage”
It was all he knew
I wished I was him, he was lucky
Back then

When I came back
I asked my friend 
Where’s Algernon
He looked a little ashamed

Poem composed 22/05/2005 at 11:02

What’s this got to do with Hamsters and Hippies (and love triangles)?

When I was a university student, I used to live in a big shared flat in York. At the time, my girlfriend, Julia, was a thirty-year-old with a four-year-old child, engaged in a custody battle with her first husband who used to beat her. I was eighteen, reading this young kid The Chamber of Secrets as a bedtime story. For some reason, I owned a hamster even though I was a perpetually stoned art student with too much shit going on in my life. I suppose I just inexplicably wanted even more extra responsibility.

In my defence, I had grown up in a family that kept swarms of guinea pigs, budgies, loads of awesome cats, and one shitty Yorkshire terrier. My house had been heaving not only with my own siblings, but we were also foster carers. We had opened our nuclear family core wide raw so that other people could come and live with us to protect themselves from their own relatives. So, I knew how shit worked, and how it didn’t. Amidst all this, I just wanted a little friend who didn’t require large chunks of my student loan (unlike Julia, whose rent and legal fees I inexplicably/inevitably found myself lending her money for).

So I had a little Russian dwarf hamster which I named Algernon. I know he’s a hamster and not a super-intelligent mouse, but the name Algernon actually comes from the Norman French als gernons, which literally translates to “with moustaches” or “whiskered man”. It started out in the 11th century as a somewhat unusual descriptive nickname before evolving into a proper given name. I’d had hamsters before (all with equally cool names) and I knew how to look after them. I discovered the hard way with a hamster called Dylan that you shouldn’t give them magic mushrooms, but that’s another story.

One of my housemates was called Neil. If you want to imagine what he was like, just imagine Neil from The Young Ones—a hippie guy who was incredibly annoying because he basically had zero grasp of reality. Neil was from Swindon, which he described as a concrete shithole; a maze of shoebox estates, multistorey car parks and depressing offices. At the time The Office was just getting popular and Neil assured us that where he was from was even more soul-destroying than seeing Ricky Gervais’s comedy career taking off. Neil was the kind of guy who, if you had run out of weed, you’d go talk to him in the hope of getting some smoke, because he always had some on account of being famously stingy. After about forty minutes of vapid philosophical bullshit and quoting Bill Hicks, or pretending to like Nick Drake (I do now, at the time not so much, I was more into Autechre) he might roll a one-skinner, smoke nearly all of it himself, and pass you the dregs. I think he did this intentionally. At first I used to enjoy our chats, but when they were not sufficiently seasoned with herb they quickly got insipid. So it goes.

Neil didn’t like the fact that I had a hamster who I kept in a cage. Despite being quite a nervous guy, he had incredibly firm convictions about how the world should be, especially regarding animals and cages. He was always saying “you should let him go, man” and “he’s a wild animal, an intelligent life-form, he shouldn’t be in a cage, man.”

One time I was going away with Julia on some trip down south to Croydon (where she was from and also where Peep Show is set). I left my hamster in the care of Neil as they had a strong bond and my other housemates were much more stoned and likely to forget to change his water. You know where this is going. When I came back, I asked Neil, “where’s Algernon?” and he casually answered that he’d released him. I think his actual words were that he’d “set him free.” Not outside, but in his bedroom. Algernon proceeded to chew through all Neil’s furniture, wires, and other shit. The idiotic hippie even had to start putting his guitar out of reach as he was worried the rodent would gnaw another hole in it. Neil would leave food out for him (the odd bit of worthless lettuce, completely insufficient to support an active hamster), but Algernon of course became quite wild, probably living off big spiders and the occasional pile of seeds from the feed I had bought when he was still my pet. Algernon chewed a hole underneath Neil’s bed, got a lot of fluff from somewhere, and made a little den. I decided that Algernon was Neil’s problem now.

Hamsters are very active at night. In a cage, they can make an awful racket, spinning on their wheels and chewing the bars of their cages. Just general hamster hijinx. But, if you let them have free roam of your entire room, they might just freak you out. You’d feel like you had a poltergeist or something. Algernon kept Neil awake night after night.

Now, the backdrop to this shared student flat in York is a weird love triangle. Neil saw me as utterly out-of-touch with nature because I had a hamster in a cage and thought it was more fun to smoke weed than hoard it because he knew otherwise nobody would want to talk to him because he was an annoying hippie. My hamster wasn’t the only thing Neil wanted to liberate from me... he also had a massive crush on my girlfriend. Julia was annoyingly nice to everyone and a total spark of life. For some reason Neil ended up tagging along when we went back to visit the Yorkshire Dales, where I was from and where Julia’s son still lived. As I recall, Julia wanted to make a film in the style of Ingmar Bergman, and Neil was to play some sprite or something. Neil had completely fallen in love with the place. He also fell in love with Julia. But I was never threatened by Neil; he just wasn’t on Julia’s radar. She needed somebody who had enough togetherness to be a vague father figure, and enough cash to keep her afloat, and while I only just made the grade (and as soon as my student loan was gone so was she), I definitely beat Neil—the stupid hippie with holes in his bed.

After I don’t know how many months, sleep-deprived and heartbroken, Neil finally managed to re-capture the now feral hamster. He took Algernon to the North Yorkshire Dales—to the exact spot where we had all gone camping and where he had portrayed a wood sprite. It was a steep wooded slope near the waterfalls walk. Neil ceremonially released Algernon “back” into the wild.

When he came back, he looked like he had endured a crucible of limestone and fast-flowing streams. I remember Neil getting violently ill around that time because he insisted he could drink the water straight from the falls. He had said this when we were out filming, and I had explicitly told him the streams were full of agricultural runoff from the nearby farms, but he didn’t believe me. “They look so clear and clean, man… how can you say they are full of chemicals, man.” I told him he could get Weil’s disease from the rats’ piss in the water. His blind, romantic idealism violently collided with the grim reality of the British countryside. Nature poisoned him for his ignorance, just as it undoubtedly killed Algernon for it. When Neil told me that he’d released my pet, I was impassive. The whole story was boring to me by that point. I’d given up on the hamster and I knew that arguing with Neil was about as pointless as a French Royalist getting a haircut in August 1792.

I have an image of Neil releasing Algernon, and Algernon kind of looking around thinking, Oh shit. I’d have much preferred your bedroom. Even my cage was better than this. Because obviously, he wasn’t native to the British countryside. Neil probably thought he was returning him to his ancestral roots, but hamsters actually hail from the freezing steppes of Eurasia. And they aren’t just cute little seed-eaters; wild hamsters are incredibly tough, opportunistic omnivores that will absolutely eat insects, frogs, and even small birds if they can get hold of them. But a little domesticated Russian dwarf hamster doesn’t stand a chance against a British bird of prey. On that steep, wooded slope, a short-eared owl if he made it to the evening, or a sparrowhawk was the most likely culprit. Maybe a kestrel. That’s exactly what I imagine his last vision was: just some fucking claws descending upon him from the canopy. Or, there’s a very high possibility the poor bastard froze to fucking death on his very first night.

Either way, that hamster is going to be some kind of tiny skeleton hidden somewhere in those ancient forests now. Or an owl pellet long gone. Crushed to atoms in an indifferent wilderness. Freedom isn’t about being in or out of a cage. That was what Neil never understood. I looked at Algernon in his tiny cage and I knew he had a lot more freedom than me. Fewer responsibilities. But that was before he wound up lining the stomach of a perfect flying winged apex dinosaur with a scissored knife-beak for a face. My friend Neil, who is no longer my friend, stole my hamster and released it to die because of an ideology based on the naivety of a guy who thought I knew nothing about nature just because I understood its cruelty better than him.

(PS the second love triangle wasn’t really a triangle but Julia ditched me for another bloke with the same name as me and the same career but he was just a few years older… which is ironic really since when I met her I was 17 and she was 29… is that irony? I don’t know but it pissed me off enough at the time to inspire me to move to Japan, where I promptly found myself part of the rat-race.)

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