OF MICE AND MEN

Mice and Other Rodents

Casimir killed a mouse the other day, and left it right in the middle of the kitchen floor, so it was there for me when I came down in the morning. I know, I should be grateful that he didn't put it on the carpet outside the bedroom door, so that we might find it with our bare feet in the night. Be grateful for small mercies, and all that. That's mistaking his motivation, though. This wasn't anything to do with us; a present to show how much he loves us, or a little snack should we be peckish in the night, or even something for us to play with. but which has unaccountably got broken. This was simply him doing his guard-cat job. It was one he killed earlier. The only problem is that he doesn't have a cat-flap, so this was a mouse from inside the house. I didn't know there were any mice inside the house. Perhaps there aren't now?

My experience is that mice are persistent. We have been having regular visits for some time at St Peter's from Wes, who we call "the rat man" (but not in his hearing). He tells us that no bait has been taken for a couple of months, and then someone sees another mouse. Tedious.

It's curious how mice have a largely positive image (especially when compared to rats) because they are just as grubby, and able to get through unfeasibly small gaps. You can clear up mouse droppings when you see them, but their urine is not so conspicuous, and as for their little footprints, the less said the better. We call poor old Wes the rat man because he was called in to deal with the rats that were living under St Mary Magdalene's School bin store, and running riot from there (school, church, my garden). He dealt with them pretty successfully (though that may be tempting fate), more successfully than the previous school site manager who had tried to fill the holes with cement, which the rats just chewed their way through. I think Wes has cleared the rats from school, but there are any number along the canalside, encouraged by all the waste food produced by the boat-dwellers. You regularly see them scuttling around.

A few years ago the BBC filmed a sequence for their reality show "I'd Do Anything" in our then-dingy undercroft. The show was to find an unknown actress-singer to take the role of Nancy in Andrew Lloyd-Webber's revival of "Oliver", and they took the young women out on various tasks as well as just singing and acting. The task that they faced at St Mary Magdalene's was to deal with rats. I can't remember whether the desired result was that they should act convincingly horrified, or that they should be able to keep their cool. Anyway, I encountered the animal wrangler unloading his stage rats from his van, and remarked that if anyone had asked us, we could have provided local rats because it was always good to provide opportunities for residents of the Estate. He didn't seem impressed. His rats were white and black, and not at all menacing.   

The real PR kings of the rodent world are the squirrels of course. London squirrels seem to be habituated to posing now, as they are the object of so many tourist photos, and are completely fearless. Or at least they seem fearless, but that may be a function of their reputedly poor eyesight. It's always amusing to see a dog chase one, because however dozy the squirrel seems, it is never so far from a tree or wall that it cannot escape by climbing, but that never deters the dog. Squirrels are making a big comeback on the Estate, having vanished completely for a couple of years, but I still wonder where they sleep, as there don't seem to be any dreys in the trees.


Men

On Monday someone used the church porch as a lavatory. I was clearing up (gloves, boots, disinfectant) when an Australian priest came to enquire about visiting; "Ah, the duties of the job," he said, smiling ruefully as I carried a pair of heavily soiled pants. I'm just grateful we now have running water in the building, as that made it a bit easier. One of those pressure washers would have been ideal, but I managed, thanks. The surprising thing was that it happened in the daytime, some time in the afternoon. Had the person been desperately hoping to make it to the loos in our new building and been thwarted by the building being locked? I wonder. Surely the nice new bin store would have been more discreet than our porch? Or did they choose us? Either way, the result did not improve my mood at Evening Prayer: it's quite hard to love the human race sometimes.