Help! I have an illegal immigrant on my ceiling

‘Is Avocado John a refugee?”

No, darling, he’s not. And I do wish you’d stop calling him that.

“An immigrant, then. He must be an illegal immigrant. If Avocado John is from North Africa, he’s not supposed to be in this country.”

My eight-year-old is right, but I’m not sure about Avocado John’s status. Smuggled? Trafficked? Or could it be that we are jumping to conclusions and he was actually born here?

“But now he’s living with us, we’ll have to keep him. Please don’t hand him over to Theresa May.” We could, but I suspect she might take fright and leg it. Avocado John, you see, is a Moorish gecko, also known as a crocodile gecko. He has an arrowshaped head, stubby spines and is a sturdy six inches long. Truth be told, he is a bit scary looking, and I can understand why my friend shrieked her house down when she found him on her kitchen ceiling last week.

None of her neighbours has lost a pet, so we can only surmise he arrived home from the Med in someone’s Majorcan suitcase or Algarve golf clubs. Either that, or there’s a secret colony of globally warmed geckos amassing in north London.

My friend is not a reptile sort of person, but dutifully caught (and named) Avocado John before storing him in her clothes basket.

She then punctiliously set about buying him a deluxe vivarium, heat lamp and a tub of live crickets. And only after all that expenditure did she decide gecko husbandry was not for her.

Personally, I would have bailed around the time of the washing basket but, to cut a long story short, we have taken in Avocado John as we already have a friendly gecko, a sociable chameleon, two dogs, and a mouse somewhere behind the cooker.

But our new arrival is not fitting in terribly well to the Durrell family mix, as he is very wild, hides all day and, without wishing to be overly transactional, isn’t giving anything back.

So what to do with him? Deportation? Repatriation? A zoo? Herpetologists, please help!