Tuesday 14 October 2008

There's A Rat In Me Kitchen, What Am I Gonna Do?

Today my head has been full of that Ali G song from a few years ago. Actually, that wasn’t the song: it was just what he was singing at the start of the video for another song I think. I’d better not look it up, or I’ll have two songs competing for the limelight in my brain, and it’s hard enough to concentrate on living life with half a dozen Jamaican rats scampering about, without wondering which of them is called Julie.

I’m not mental, there’s good reason for there to be rats in my brain - just like I’m sure they had good reason to be in Ali’s kitchen. Thing is – they’ve moved out of his cuisine and into mine. Only they probably aren’t the same ones (because they’d be used to a celebrity lifestyle after all those years with Sasha Baron Cohen – especially after the success of Borat – and would never downsize to a Pompey terrace,) and they’re not rats. They, or rather ‘it,’ is a mouse.

The first sign that there was a “rat in me kitchen” was when we came downstairs one morning to find lots of bits of silver foil in the carpet. We couldn’t work out where they’d come from, but they appeared ‘nibbled’ - rather than torn or chewed by the dog. Later that day I grabbed a packet of crisps from the cupboard and soon realised there weren’t actually any crisps in it. In fact, the dominant feature of the packet was no longer the “foil sealed freshness” but the ‘mouse nibbled emptiness.’ It certainly solved the puzzle about where the foil bits had come from. They were Ready Salted flavour, if you're interested. (I know, I thought they'd go for Cheese & Onion too, but I don't like them either.)

It’s probably quite a good advert for the crisps, that the mouse ate all of them, because they say animals won’t eat anything that’s ‘off.’ My first cat – Fluffy – saved me from eating mouldy chicken once when my mother tried to poison me. (Well, it may not have been that deliberate, but apathetic neglect puts you on the same path to food-poisoning as intent to sicken would.) Neglect might be a bit strong too, she just couldn’t be bothered to cook so said the chicken that smelled funny would be fine. I took the skin off (being all fussy) and it was mouldy. Mum said it would be fine, but I knew animals have better noses than people so I said I’d only eat it if the cat would. Fluffy refused to go near it, and actually looked quite disgusted at the prospect. So the fact that the mouse actually made the effort to chew through the packet to get to the crisps suggests they must be a quality foodstuff. Even so, I don’t think that’s a slogan that will help Gary Linneaker sell many.

Alternatively, I think the mouse may have had post-intoxication munchies, in which case crisps would be an obvious choice. You see, whenever we have mice, they go after foil. Our previous mouse got caught when it ate an oxo cube and left the foil shards strewn about the kitchen, and the one before that ate some tin-foil, which was how we discovered its presence. This leads me to the obvious conclusion that the mice are not after the food in this house at all; they’re after the foil. The only people who have a sustained use for sneaking foil in the middle of the night are drug users, so I am beginning to suspect that my kitchen might be some kind of rodent crack-den.

We tried putting some traps down, though think we made a mistake in putting cheese on them and not silver foil, as that’s what they are really after. I’m not sure why we bothered with traps – they have eaten so much foil that they are probably magnetic by now. If we put a powerful magnet on a string and dangled it behind the worktop it’s probably come back up choc-full of smack-mice.

This was actually filmed in my kitchen: Mouse Party

As the traps didn’t work (which, as I say, I wasn’t surprised about) we put down some bright blue poison. Today we checked to see if it had been eaten and it had. In another bit of the kitchen in a corner there were some mouse droppings, which prove the critter is still alive because they were the colour of the poison. That’s not what the poison is supposed to do. It’s supposed to kill the mouse not just turn its shit turquoise. Maybe we bought joke-shop mouse poison.

Dad has a mouse in his kitchen too, though it may just be the same one bringing its laundry here like all his other lodgers while their washing machine is broken. Or it’s our mouse’s dealer. That would make more sense. Why would a mouse do its washing in a crack-den? He has a more novel way of catching his mouse. He suggested ambushing it in the night with darts. I’ll know if dad’s mouse ever comes down here to skin up with our mouse, because his will look like some sort of miniature commercialised porcupine; covered in Union Jacks and adverts for Guinness, and whatever other dart-flights he’s got now.

I don’t know why we’re fussing over ousting these rodents. I think we should have just given them some old chicken. That’d poison them. They probably wouldn’t have eaten it though; mice aren’t as daft as me mother.

On a less infested sort of a note, it’s eight years since I had my operation this week, and I received an invite to a Christmas lunch with the IA – the organisation I have done some writing for. Now, the IA are all tied up with the rather unpleasant business of IBS – and the associated effects and accoutrements – so I can’t imagine that going to a Christmas lunch with a room full of people suffering in that way would be much fun. Though I suppose everyone in the room would have a legitimate excuse to avoid the sprouts for once. Even so, it’s not really the way I’d like to mark all this ‘being incredibly difficult’ that I’ve been perfecting for more than three-quarters of a decade. I was hoping for a letter from the Queen, or notification of getting onto the Christmas Honours List or something. There’s a bit of me that would like to turn down an MBE. It’s more rock and roll, and the daft hierarchy of the honours system annoys me. I like the royals as a tourist attraction, and because the pomp and ceremony is traditional and amusing. It all contributes to maintaining a British identity. If actually given an opportunity to meet the Queen though, I’d be there like a shot. My ego couldn’t live with turning it down. I’d want to go just for the anecdote.

That is possibly my most dangerous trait. There are lots of things I’d do “just for the anecdote,” because I sometimes get bored when telling people stories of the life I’ve lived, and could use a few things to liven it up a bit. I know other people think it’s interesting, but I think that if I’d had lunch with Her Majesty - or woken up in a field with Kate Moss, Johnny Depp, a tin of Ambrosia custard and 50yds of bubble-wrap or something - then I’d not find my narcissistic self-promotion so repetitive.

And I probably wouldn’t get so obsessed with why there are mice smoking heroin in my kitchen.

...I did look that song up, it was bugging me too much. Here’s the video:

Signed, Sealed, and (Hopefully) Delivered

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