Bookhound was doing the town trip. One of us decides we have the steam for the post office, the library, and all the bits and pieces that everyone's written on the kitchen whiteboard.
We communicate via kitchen white-board here...
'Next one out car needs petrol.'
'Monday 9pm BBC 1 Spooks.'
'Lighting tube for under kitchen cupboard F15W/135'
But I knew he would forget the most important item so I rang the mobile and uttered one word...
'Mousetraps.'
And I'm so very sorry to all those of you who adore them and use humane traps to release your rodent invaders back into the wild, except I'm told by them as know that it's illegal to do that unless you release them onto your own land, in which case they'll be back indoors before you.
So it's Little Nipper time because there is the annual clog dance going on in the Book Room loft space over my head as I type and I can hear brave Bookhound, who doesn't suffer from my musophobia, up there mixing it with the Muridae on my behalf.
As a student health visitor back in the dark ages, I spent a day with a community psychiatric nurse as he treated patients with phobias. It was my good fortune to be visiting on spider day (I'm not much better with arachnoids it has to be said) and please don't ask me how I got through the day; keeping a cool countenance in front of the quivering patients whilst sweating buckets and thinking I should be one of them. Much worse he gave me his jar of dead spiders to look after, occasionally removing one and asking the phobic person to place it in their pocket. The game was almost up and there's me, fixed smile, uttering words of gentle encouragement whilst praying they wouldn't ask me to do it too. I was poleaxed by the time I got home that evening to our flat in Plymouth and unfortunately some sort of transference was hatched when a mouse ran across my foot in the kitchen, and that was me and the kitchen off limits until the rodent control man had been, and another musophobic was born. Hence mouser cats chez dovegrey.
Anyway good things have come of Bookhound's loft excursion because the odd smell we'd been getting a whiff of (and it seems erroneously blaming the Gamekeeper's socks) has now been diagnosed as a long dead mouse in one of last year's traps. There's the occasional *bang* followed by a plaintive *ow* as Bookhound tries to set the bait with our magic recipe of dog biscuits laced with jam....do you have any good mouse-attracting recipes? I won't explain the principle behind the dog biscuit element except to say it's all about timing.
We have no idea where the mice get in but it would seem our defences have been well and truly breeched again this year and I now have the horror of the bang that will happen right over my head when the trap is sprung, and then I have to run out of the room at the mere thought of the carnage happening up there.
Meanwhile I'll leave you with these words of wisdom from Ralph Waldo Emerson for no other reason than he mentions books and mousetraps in the same sentence.
'If a man write and better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mouse-trap than his neighbour, tho' he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.'
Recent Comments