total pea-roast, but you might find this amusing
This is probably a good place to tell you about my amazing snake.

About 5 years ago a friend was getting rid of his corn snake. As I've always wanted a snake I asked for him, and Huzzah! I became the happy keeper of a beautiful corn snake. He had a small scar from when My friend had lost him and found him with the hoover, but was lovely looking and having been brought up in a house with very small children was very tolerant.

A year or so later, we had to move house, and couldn't find a new one before we had to move out of the old one, so we went to stay with some people we knew,and put most of our stuff in storage. Three days after we got there, we returned to their house to discover smoke pouring out from under the floorboards in the living room. After wandering about for a bit trying to work out what was going on, we open the hall door to go upstairs and met with a wall of smoke. yup, their bloody house was on fire. We later found out the floor had collapsed over where we were wandering around shortly after we got out. Hurrah for not dying!

Among our clothes and other replaceable essentials, my snake was upstairs in his tank in our bedroom. the fire was upstairs. Arse. Not much I could do about it though.

After a few hours of worrying that the fire was our fault (it wasn't - woo!) and watching the firemen go in and out, the fire was vanquished. One of the firemen (in full kit) was nearly killed by the backdraft when he opened the door into our friends bedroom where the fire had been caused by a dodgy electrical socket sparking. The heat had been so intense it melted all her jewellery and stuff. My snake was in the next room. Again, arse.

Then a nice firelady asked whose the snake was. Sadly, I said he was mine, expecting to be shown a blackened crispy dead thing. She said she didn't really understand why, but he was OK. He was a bit brown and sticky (like a stick!) from the smoke, but he was otherwise fine. Still, 4 (8 now - this is an ooold pearoast) years on, when he sheds his skin (more often than he used to) there's always a brown smudge along the top of it. For a couple of days afterwards he was quite sluggish, so my guess is that he slowed down his breathing or some other reptilian trickery. I dunno.

2 years later he escaped. He had been prowling around his tank looking for a mate, refusing to eat anything for a few months, when he managed to prise the lid open and get out. The front door happened to be open, and he was gone by the time we realised. Arse!

A whole year later, I was coming in from the garden, when there he was! My wife came running because I bellowed 'SHIT!" so loudly she thought I was hurt. When she saw me with Rusty around my neck she was speechless. I should probably mention here that we live in the North Cornish countryside, in England. He'd survived a whole year, including a fairly harsh British winter. There were feathers in his poo, so he'd definately been hunting, etc. There had been an unconfirmed sighting of a corn snake over a mile away from us while he was gone. I like to think that was him. Now after another escape scare (kids left tank lid off, he got out but was under my daughters bed) he's curled up in his tank in my office.

So huzzah for my amazing cornsnake - he's survived fire, the English countryside, vacuum cleaners and small children.

Length? about 5ft now!
(teasus likes tea, Fri 1 Feb 2013, 20:14, Reply)