Nugget was meant to be a two-year commitment for a seven-year-old who promised faithfully to clean the hutch. He lived six years and the hutch was cleaned by adults, which everybody had privately expected.
He had one trick and it was extraordinary. He could hear the fridge door from anywhere in the house and would begin shrieking within about a second, on the entirely reasonable grounds that the fridge contained capsicum and capsicum was his. He was right often enough that we kept doing it.
He was not a lap animal and he was not soft about it. He liked to be near you rather than on you, and he would sit under the edge of the couch with his chin on the carpet, making a low rumbling noise, for hours.
When Marmite died in 2023 he went quiet for a fortnight and we thought we might lose him too. He came right, eventually, and spent his last years as the sole and undisputed owner of the run.
Six years is a good innings for a guinea pig. The fridge is much less exciting now.