We carried on with the usual hamsters, gerbils, rabbits and guinea pigs until in 1998 Catherine won a competition to design a teeshirt. When she attended the press photo-call to be presented with the cheque they asked her what she was going to do with the money, and were rather taken aback when she announced that she would spend it on buying a rat and a suitable cage! (Not the answer they had expected from a teenage girl!) So Guinness came into our life. She was very tame from the start and rode around on Catherine's shoulder once she grew too big to fit in her shirt pocket. Sadly, after only a year she developed a chest infection which turned to pneumonia and, despite devoted nursing, died in September 1999. Catherine was devastated and would not contemplate replacing her, but after a month she decided that she really did want another rat and so went out and bought a seven-week-old baby female rat, dark grey with white paws, which she called Foster. The following day she bought another baby female, champagne-coloured this time, with a darker nose and tail, about the same age but from a different breeder, which she called Murphy (continuing the breweries theme - Guinness was a black-and-white hooded rat, so in her case the name was quite appropriate.)