The Tortoise Who Outlasted Three Sofas

The tortoise arrived in 1974, in a cardboard box with holes punched in the lid, as a birthday present for a nine-year-old who had asked for a bicycle. He has been in the same house ever since. The nine-year-old has not.

He has outlasted three sofas. The brown one, which he is said to have preferred, went in 1986. The pale one nobody was allowed to sit on lasted until 2003. The current one is grey, and he treats it with the same indifference he showed the others, which is to say he walks along the front of it every morning at the same unhurried pace, checking the length of the room.

He has also outlasted two carpets, a dog, four televisions, three of the family's cars and one entire conservatory, which was built for him and which he declined to use. The only fixture older than him in the room is the fireplace, and he has been observed sitting in front of it for whole afternoons, in what the family has decided is professional respect.

The nine-year-old is sixty-one now and comes at Christmas. She says the strangest thing is not that he is still here. It is that he moves at precisely the speed he always did, and that in fifty-two years she has never once seen him hurry, or slow down.