Of Mice and Men.
Here, just as in London, you are never less than 2m from a rodent of some sort. Well, perhaps not quite as infested as that, but there are plenty of mice in the farm and quite a lot of field mice generally lolling around living the life. This would be especially true of the mice that found their way into my grandmother’s kitchen and had a fine time eating knäckerbröd and rice before she noticed that the bread had extra-frilly edges. Out came the mouse trap and on went the cheese and oats, which they duly ate too, before becoming too fat to avoid the spring. Two days after I’d cleaned up all the mouse droppings around the kitchen, my grandmother, being very fond of cats, presented me with an old flour bag and told me she had a present for my kitten. Naively I thought how sweet it was and looked forward to Psychokitty playing with some of Grandmother’s old cat’s toys. Then she said that she thought she’d left the trap in the bag and could I fish it out before I went.
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You know all those good manners that your mother literally bangs into you as a child? Parents – take note. The glares, repetition, etc work! Isn’t that nice?
Another lesson to learn is never to feed any cats you may find hanging around the place. My father didn’t take any notice of this very good guidance and fed the black cat that was hanging around the veranda, even though they would only be there for 4 weeks. As Evil S doesn’t believe in feeding cats (“it’s unnatural”), the mog hung around in the hope of nice food and kept the grounds mouse and pigeon free in the meanwhile. In the ‘natural’ course of events, she had a kitten and then we turned up. It is physically impossible to refuse to feed a kitten when it’s staring at you through the glass and winter is on the way. Just. Totally. Impossible. So, we have acquired a kitten in practice and, as ES doesn’t probably know it exists and for definite won’t have registered it, we now have it in actuality (this could be an American word, but is part of the evolution of the English language and it fits – so tough).
A cat mother will bring her kitten dead mice to give them a taste for it. What my grandmother didn’t know was that Psycho had moved up from dead mice to live mice(such a nuisance cleaning the blood off the floor) and dead pigeons. We’re trying to persuade Mog to skip the live pigeons and go onto dead deer, but are making little headway at the moment.
Still, Psycho enjoyed her present from the house. Although I am a morning person, I confess that I can forget to examine the ground before I put my feet down at 6am, and I don’t always wear slippers. Can I recommend stepping on a mouse’s rear end and squashing the liver for waking up thoroughly in the morning? It is so effective and totally natural....
