I'm OK with a mouse that's wild and free. Questing voles passing feather-footed through the plashy fen? -they get my vote every time.
But I was never that keen on the sort of rodents you mostly get in houses.
In 1969 or so, I bought a copy of a book called "Ratman's Notebooks" in Woolworths (I think it cost me a shilling). The narrator describes how he trains a pack of rats to do horrible things to his enemies, but then they turn on him, and the book ends in a "O no they're scratching at the door" sort of way. I read it, horrified, in the attic room I inhabited in a Welsh house where the scrabbling sounds of mice came from above, below, and the sides.
And then there was the night that father and his new intended went out for the evening, leaving us children alone in a (to me) unfamiliar and unpleasant-smelling house in Preston, Lancashire. We watched a horror film on telly, and my troubled sleep was later broken by snuffling sounds in the dark. In the morning, I found a mouse caught in a trap in the kitchen and gravely wounded, snuffling through its own blood.
And then there was the farmhouse I was working on in Devon, when I popped up to Bristol for the weekend, and returned to find that rats had found their way into the house and started chewing through anything that took their fancy. Right bloody mess it was too. I chased them out with a stick, and slept the night in my car rather than stay in the house that night.
Katie, on the other hand, very much wanted a pet with a bit more in the upstairs department than Twinkle the hamster. Twinkle is OK, but she's hardly the shiniest apple in the bowl. Katie wants an animal who can share adventures and return her love.
So here is Yuki. "Are you sure it's all right?" asked Katie for the thousandth time as we walked to the pet shop. I made reassuring noises.
We let Yuki settle into her new cage undisturbed for a day, then Katie started handling her gently. Yuki took up residence on Katie's shoulder, occasionally releiveing herself there. The pile of washing mounted higher.
Yuki looked very lonely in her cage though, and it seemed cruel to have so sociable an animal in solitary confinement.
So now she has been joined by Pookie.
Picture no doubt to follow.
Yuki is a mouse, isn't she/he?
ReplyDeleteI bet there are babies before you get to post another pic.
Ratman's Notebooks sounds like the film Willard to me.
I wonder if the smell in Preston was because the house had gas. My town granny's and my Auty's houses always smelt strange because of that, but scrambled egg is better made with gas, so that was okay by me
No, Anji, she's a rat. And Pookie is a she too, or so we are assured.
ReplyDeleteI did a Google, and Willard is indeed the film of the book. But I stopped watching horror films at about the same time as I saw my first one.
You're right; the house did have gas, which I'd never encountered before. And unfamiliar smells matter much more when you're young, I think.
P.S. I like Katie's haircut.
ReplyDeleteGosh! Katie has your eyes Dru!
ReplyDeleteYep. Willard it was.... Ben was the rat, IIRC. Michael Jackson even sung a dreadful song about him.
ReplyDeleteAs for rats..... Some observations.
I like pet rats...
I speak as a former qualified professional pest controller.
Rats get a bad press.
It's not really fair, because they are what they are, they do what they do and it's not their fault they carry some nasty diseases. They are not "evil".
Control is vital because of the damage they do and the disease issue, but I never felt any hatred towards them. They are animals, they don't follow human values, and can't be judged on them.
Tame rats kept and looked after as pets are great fun.
I tend towards ferrets myself. Like rats they are naturally inquisitive, playful and great fun to watch and play with. I have two. Tinkerbell is very good natured, but I wouldn't let CocoPops crawl over my neck because she'd want a taste....
Lovely picture, Dru....
chrissie
xxx
Friends had a rat, " Ratty ), which they 'saved" from a science department at a university. It had never seen another rat and was convinced that it was human. It loved falling asleep on a foot if you had crossed your legs, it loved the rocking. Many years later they got him a friend, they hated each other, the new one went to live under the floor because he knew he was a rat, Ratty stayed with the humans!
ReplyDeleteWhat a sublime character study in reds and whites!
ReplyDeleteHaving always had cats, I usually only see mice when they are in the process of being devoured. My mother lived in a house near a pond in New York State with one handicapped cat, declawed for the sake of the furniture, for whom mice were like greased piglets, and rats, usually in the walls, ignored.
I received a call one night to come from five miles away to rescue Mom from a noisy rat behind the china cabinet, next to the piano where Mom gave lessons. Driven from its shelter, it wriggled between the tines of the pitchfork I aimed at it, but stopped on the second or third try. Not exactly Orwell shooting an elephant, but Mom was grateful.
Footnote on Preston: my great-great grandfather, born in Barrowford, worked on the Blackburn & Preston Railroad in his teens (1847) before emigrating to St. Louis, joining the Mormons, and eventually founding the city of Preston, Idaho.
I'll pass it on, Anji. She's getting bored with it and was talking about getting highlights...
ReplyDeleteI wish I had hers, Caroline; my specs prescription gets bigger numbers in it every year
I do agree, Chrissie; my discomfort with rats is visceral, maybe because I mostly knew about them through media portrayals, long before I met a real one. Hmm, sound familiar? -I do want to like them, not lkeast because we now have two living with us. And at the moment they seem far more timid and even afraid of us than anything else. My brother used to keep ferrets, by the way, in his spare bedroom. They were nice, but I couldn't stand the bags of dead chicks he used to get for them
I'm hoping the new rat, Pookie, isn't going to be an unsettling influence, Caroline; she seems even more reluctant to be handled than Yuki. Maybe the extra week in the petshop is the reason, though they all have their own personalities too, I guess.
Declawing seems like an awful thing to do, Larry. I'm just reading Black Beauty again (I must have been about 10 when I read it last) and it's quite a catalogue of the casual cruelties inflicted upon (chiefly) horses for the sake of fashion and appearances.
Apparently there's a town called Marland somewhere in the USA; I was contacted by a busybody to whom I may be distantly related, who was recruiting Marlands for her Marland Society. She broke contact with me when I explained (in vague terms) why my present name differs from the family tree. "Yup, sounds like a Marland to me" I thought... funny, in my memory, it is always raining in Preston. Do you feel a swelling of Old Prestonian pride when you contemplate Preston, Idaho?
Pride, no; at best, perhaps, a dim recognition. I've never been physically to either place in this lifetime, but travelled through that part of Idaho on a train with my dad, mom, brother, and sister when I was ten. Wasn't raised (and never became) a Mormon either, but recently a friend's e-mail about an incident in Mormon-US history triggered my curiosity. I located my mother's gift of her Lancashire-born Great Grandpa Parkinson's family, an 888-page tome by a grandson named Preston. It includes a whole chapter on the Pendle District of Lancs, the Ribble River Valley, and Preston, a frequent Mormon pilgrimage site not only because many Saints had origins there, but as "the oldest continuously functioning unit of the Church" since Joseph Smith in 1837 appointed a group of elders "to go to England to open the Church's first foreign mission. The day after [the] Elders...arrived in Liverpool, Elder Kimball recorded in his journal that he prayed to the Lord for direction, and was soon told, "Go to Preston," which they did the following day." It was July, and the mission was welcomed and many baptisms performed and branches opened, so it's reasonable to suppose some sunshine was involved.
ReplyDelete(Maybe it was the rain here that made me type pitchfork above, when it was a potato fork... The rat was composted.)
I feel unwhelmed at the thought of Marland, Oklahoma, too. Preston was the Big City when I was very small; I remember the sense of wonder that my mother could not only drive there but then find her way home again afterwards. We used to get pots of Morecambe Bay shrimps from the market, as a treat. They are still high up on my list of nicest-things-you-can-eat.
ReplyDeleteI lived in Chester and Paoli, Pennsylvania, most of my first seven years, learning place-names that were mostly echoes of England and Wales. But until I started reading your blog I still wasn't sure whether Cornwall was east or west of either. Now your island is starting to take a clearer shape in my mind.
ReplyDeleteMy mother had lived in New Orleans and loved to buy jumbo shrimp from wherever, which I enjoyed helping prepare for the sauce and rice, mouth and tummy.
I want to find a camera (I have none now) that would take a picture as good as yours of Kate.
We have a village called Pennsylvania just outside Bristol, though it is rather less imposing than the US stae; as the Wiki entry says,
ReplyDeleteThe village has an petrol station and at least one Bed and Breakfast.
Wow...
The Penns were Bristolian, of course...
I've potted shrimps, but only shop-bought ones; I have a huge shrimp net but have never quite managed to catch anything. Maybe this year.
My camera's a Nikon D70, which I've had for a few years now, which probably means it's practically obsolete and therefore cheaply available on e-bay... if you do end up with a camera of whatever flavour, I look forward to seeing the results.
We have a village called Pennsylvania just outside Bristol, though it is rather less imposing than the US stae; as the Wiki entry says,
ReplyDeleteThe village has an petrol station and at least one Bed and Breakfast.
Wow...
The Penns were Bristolian, of course...
I've potted shrimps, but only shop-bought ones; I have a huge shrimp net but have never quite managed to catch anything. Maybe this year.
My camera's a Nikon D70, which I've had for a few years now, which probably means it's practically obsolete and therefore cheaply available on e-bay... if you do end up with a camera of whatever flavour, I look forward to seeing the results.
Pennsylvania in Gloucestershire!
ReplyDeleteI will shop around for a camera.
I think I took some pretty good pix in the 90s with a traded camera. It had one of those five-year batteries, but I couldn't find a replacement. Since then I've used a couple of disposables.
Haven't scanned any yet. You'll know when I do.