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

Hugo Rifkind

Wednesday, 16th May 2007

Anyway, as all serial killers would probably agree, every death gets a little easier. In time, in our flat, there was peace. We put the traps away and blocked off the holes.

Then, after about a month of nothing, I awoke to the sound of scrabbling. I tried to ignore it. I convinced myself it was the wind. Eventually, though, I emerged into the hallway. And there was a hole. In the carpet. The virtually new, really rather expensive Chinese sea-grass carpet. So. Now it is war. Now it is mouse glue. Humanity be damned.

***

Incarceration, obviously, wouldn’t work with mice. Does it work with celebrities? According to her original sentence, Paris Hilton (the hotel heiress and logical conclusion of modern America) is due to start a 45-day stretch in a couple of weeks. From any perspective, she deserves it. She was pulled over twice for driving with a suspended licence. In California you can probably get the chair for less.

Yet it unsettles me. It unsettled me when Aitken went down, and Archer too. People forget, but in 2003 that great prison-dodger Pete Doherty (the boyfriend of Kate Moss and logical conclusion of modern Britain) actually went to jail for a while. Even that unsettled me, and I had barely heard of him. Next time (there will be a next time) I expect to be distraught.

Why so? It might be a poor idea to break a butterfly on a wheel, but Archer and Aitken surely make for poor butterflies. No, I suspect it is actually a sort of vicarious nimbyism. Most of us prefer to think of the convicted as bad sorts, not the type we would let into our houses, even through the medium of a glossy magazine. When it happens to someone we know, or at least know of, perhaps we are confronted with how horrible a thing prison really is. A bit like seeing a mouse in a trap. In a way.

Although perhaps I am wrong to worry. Last year the American actress Michelle Rodriguez, who played a (necessarily) brief role in the television drama Lost, was jailed for driving under the influence. ‘It was so cool,’ this particular butterfly wrote afterwards. ‘I love people, and it was a primal crew. The only thing that keeps them going is fighting for salt and making dice out of soap.’

Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.

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