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Shared Opinion

I felt sorry for the mice — and then they messed with my Chinese sea-grass carpet

Hugo Rifkind

Wednesday, 16th May 2007

I resisted mouse glue for a long time. ‘Mouse’ and ‘glue’ are words that should not, sanely, sit together. They speak of a world where all the parameters have changed, a world of budgie staples and dog sharpeners. I wanted none of it.

I have a friend who scatters the stuff all around her home in northern France. She visits every six months and collects up the many withered mouse skeletons glued around her skirting-boards. Mouse glue is, as the name suggests, glue intended for mice. It lives, in the form of a paste, inside a cardboard funnel with the words ‘Mouse Glue’ on the outside. It smells, softly, of cheese.

In the ten years I have lived in London, I have had all manner of pests. Fleas came first. They were fun. They were left behind by the previous occupants of a rather grim flat above a sushi restaurant in Brixton, who were, I think, Etonians to a man. The fleas weren’t the worst thing they left behind (that honour goes to the syringe under the sofa) but they were still pretty upsetting. You could pull up your sleeve over the black carpet on the stairs, and they would patter up to your arm, like topsy-turvy rain.

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