I lay in bed listening to them romping about the ceiling space in the small hours.
Unlike the two-legged rats in and around Downing St last week, they showed no intention of deserting the sinking ship.
The fancy tube-like rat trap bought about a year ago remains in a virginal state up there in the warmth of the insulation. I don’t blame the rats for spurning it. It looks as claustrophobic as a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner to me. If I am honest, I am not sure I could still pass the intelligence test required to set it again. I vaguely recall there were rubber rings involved, but have I confused rat killing with castration? Not a happy situation, whichever way you look at it.
Attention to detail is not my strong suit, obviously, but perhaps it’s fashionable. I noticed the recent report from Sir Graham Panckhurst to the Otago Regional Council about the handling of the illegal dumping saga was peppered with errors — among them the consistent use of personal instead of personnel and a nonsensical instance of complicate being used instead of complicit. I am a bit of a Mrs Malaprop myself, but this seemed unusual. I asked the ORC if anyone there had proofread the report (or were they too busy worrying about redacting it) and whether it needed to be revisited. This was the response from interim chief executive Pim Borren: "The Council did not seek the opportunity for any changes to be made to Sir Graham’s final report, which is on our website." I am not sure what that says about the ORC’s quality control, particularly when it didn’t get much change from $29,000 for the report. Perhaps such amounts are just rats and mice to the council.
Enough of the digression. Hearing the pre-dawn rat romping, our version of No 10’s Larry, Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office, Roxy the Roadside Rescue from Roxburgh, was not helpful.
During the day she is happy to flaunt her ghastly mouse torturing antics, shifting any prey to the front lawn so her hero, the Crazy Cat Gentleman, is obliged to view the proceedings from his office set-up. (He has learned not to interfere with these events, after his attempt to rescue a mouse from her predecessor resulted in him sustaining an ungrateful bite from the escaping rodent.) She also deposits the occasional already dead fat rat on to the lawn.
Nights are a different story. She seems to think she is off-duty.
To be fair, during the rats’ revelry she had no access to the ceiling space, but if there was a party going on she was determined to be part of it. Her idea of a good time, alternating running madly round and round the top of the duvet with pointless leaps in the air, was not mine.
She has also failed to catch the fat mouse we saw crawling up the warm stonework beside the fire in the lounge recently. We set a trap baited with classy peanut butter which merely contributed to the mouse’s girth. Figuring the trap needed something heavier we put on cheese topped with more classy peanut butter. The mouse’s body mass index (BMI) went up another few numbers and still the trap was not triggered. We bought a different trap which was supposed to be more sensitive. The classy peanut butter remains and there is no sign of the mouse.
Now there is poison in the ceiling space, all is quiet, which is slightly different from No 10, where the vainglorious and delusional Boris Johnson is still in situ. Hopefully, his ludicrous plans to continue as prime minister until the autumn have been scuppered by the party promptly getting on with sorting out a replacement.
Perhaps this time round, those considering the new leader should crank up British singer Laura Marling’s Gurdjieff’s Daughter and belt out the verse which begins: "Don’t be impressed/ By strong personalities/Sincere words/Are rarely sickly sweet/But if they fool you/Which they have been known to/ Don’t lose your sight/ Know something’s not right ... ".
Anyone who cynically hitched themselves to Boris’ dubious star, when even a cursory look at his past should have made anyone with morals and integrity run a mile, should rule themselves out of the running.
That’s not how it works in politics, of course, or even in my house. The rats return as soon as they think the poison’s gone.
- Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
