Life in the slow lane
ON long summer days, Mark Blathwayt remembers his childhood tortoises’ faces appearing at the kitchen door. Lured by the sound of the Test match, there was often evidence of a trip to the raspberry canes lingering around Duffer and Daisy’s mouths. ‘Where the radio was, we were and, where we were, there might be a dandelion flower, a bit of tomato or a strawberry,’ says Mr Blathwayt, who took the tortoises with him to Somerset in the 1970s, after he got married. By the time the sweet-toothed pair died as nonagenarians, they had been a mainstay of his four children’s childhoods, too.
‘It’s not a short-term project, having a tortoise,’ admits Heather Alston, alluding to a life expectancy that exceeds
