Stinky asked me to lift him out of his cage so he could practise on my desk but, as soon as he got on the skateboard, he lost his balance and landed on his bottom.
He muttered, shook his head and stepped back onto the board.
Then he wobbled, yelped and fell off again.
‘Ouch,’ he said.
At school today, after we’d learned about special animal talents, Miss Miles told us about things that some animals can’t do. Kangaroos, for example, can’t walk backwards. Cows can’t walk down stairs (which explains why you never see one in a basement). Elephants can’t jump.
She should have added something else to that list: hamsters can’t skate.
It was ten minutes before Stinky could get the skateboard moving, but then the problem was he couldn’t stop. I had to catch him before he fell off the desk and plummeted to the floor. I put him back on the desk and he tried to get his breath back.
‘Skateboarding,’ he complained, ‘is by no means as easy as it looks.’
‘We can give up if you want,’ I said with a shrug, ‘and try something else.’
‘Give up?’ Stinky wheezed, as if he didn’t even understand the meaning of the words. ‘I think not.’
He hopped back onto the skateboard. And fell off again.
Just watching him was painful.
‘I’ve got an idea, Stinky.’
He looked up at me suspiciously. ‘When you have an idea,’ he said, ‘it usually ends up with me doing something highly dangerous.’
‘Not this time,’ I said. ‘I’ve learned a lot from you, Stinky. But today I’m going to try to teach you something.’
I put him back in his cage and then moved it next to my window, so he had a good view of the garden. Then I went outside, fetched my skateboard from the shed and put on my helmet.
I wasn’t fantastic at skateboarding but, unlike Stinky, I at least knew how to stay on the thing, most of the time.
I skated around the garden, showing Stinky how to go fast, how to turn and how to stop without hurting himself. Then I showed him a couple of tricks: I spun around, did a little jump and finally flipped up the skateboard and caught it.
When I’d finished I looked at Stinky and gave him a thumbs up.
Hamsters don’t have thumbs, of course, and he couldn’t give me one back. So I rushed straight back to my room to find out if my demonstration had been useful.
‘What did you think?’ I panted.
‘Most instructive,’ he said.
‘Excuse me?’
He sighed. ‘It means I learned a lot.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Good.’
