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Tuesday 2 December 2008

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

Then there were the cockroaches. I didn’t like them at all. Them and their horrible alien persistence. This was in another flat and, again, was the fault of a previous occupant. The man from Rentokil said it was probably because she was from the Middle East, and we weren’t sure if he was right, or racist, or both. They also faced glue, in similar little cardboard tubes, but I gather that was a monitoring thing.

It is our own flat this time, our first. Complete with an Ikea kitchen that looks as if it comes from somewhere else, and a really rather expensive Chinese sea-grass carpet. And now, also, complete with mice. It’s always on the second mouse that you start to worry, isn’t it? The first, you convince yourself, could be some sort of rodent pioneer, a Christopher Columbus of mice, seeking a new world. When the second takes an insouciant strut through your living-room, you know you have a problem.

I have killed many things in my life, some with my bare hands. Neither fish nor fowl had prepared me for the sound of a mouse having his back broken by a bit of wire. A snap, a flip, and then far, far too many seconds of scrabbling. We sat on the sofa, my wife and I, ashen-faced, hands over mouths. It can’t have helped, I suppose, that we were simultaneously watching Jack Bauer being tortured by Red China in 24. We were Red China. It had shiny bulging black eyes, like little beads. Awful.

Suddenly, everyone has mice. Suddenly, everyone wants to talk about them. I have one colleague who delights in emailing me photographs of every mouse hole he finds in the House of Commons. With another, I discuss preventative measures. Mouse glue, we have always agreed, is a bit much. No fully functioning human can be OK with mouse glue. What do you do with a half-dead mouse stuck to a bit of cardboard? Do you stamp? I don’t like to think about it.

Cats, I suppose, inflict worse suffering upon the mouse, but at least they are natural. (Where do vegans stand on cats? Must check.) Although the problem with cats, I gather, is their insufferable pomp. They don’t do humility. For every mouse caught, you have a month of a cat taking itself terribly seriously, pouncing into corners and carrying itself with an air of mission. I’m not sure I could deal with that.

In itself, though, isn’t urban middle-class mouse fascination a fascinating thing? If we lived in jungle, or tundra, or the bits of North America that agoraphobics write books about, we would probably swap brave battle tales about lions, or bears, or wolves. As it is, we live in cities. We talk about mice. Fleas, ticks and cockroaches are too shameful and make people edge away. Rats just don’t sound that much fun. Mice, though, mice we can handle.

More articles from: Hugo Rifkind | this section

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