Chewing up the walls
February 1st, 2009 by sbalb
Brennig seems to have had a lovely weekend, the bastard. In comparison, I’ve had a couple of days of traipsing around getting and then using a carpet cleaner, fixing my brakes, and working out strategies to get rid of mice without actually buying traps or sledgehammers.
That’s right, the murine infiltration has begun again, in scratchy, rattly, chewy earnest. We haven’t actually caught sight of them yet, though, which also means that our makeshift traps don’t work. They seem to have found a way into the interstices between the old and new bits of our property. All we can hear is a two-a.m. (and five-a.m.) tearing up of something by tiny, grabbing hands: hopefully nothing electrical or load-bearing. addedentry suggested that we should measure the dimensions of all of our rooms, to make sure that our barking landlady hadn’t constructed her own home in the walls, in the style of The Third Policeman or Brighton Pavilion’s servant passageways.
The thought of that mad bat scurrying around when we’re asleep chills me far more than the thought of mice doing it: in comparison, I merely find the mice incredibly annoying as they keep my consciousness just above the level of recuperative sleep, and I don’t relish the prospect of them crawling over me in my sleep (which, as they’re scared prey animals, is as unlikely as the urban legend about swallowing spiders.) Ultimately too that annoyance conflicts with my instinct to be protective of such tiny scraps of life. As an example of how intermittently pathetic I am, yesterday I brought a toolbox in from the shed and found that I’d accidentally woken up a hibernating ladybird, which would probably then die back in the shed: two sheets of paper and a lot of cursing later, it’s now resting on the top of one of our bookcases. It’s clear from this behaviour that I’d accommodate the mice, if they weren’t so potentially harmful to the house, our food and our health. They have to go.
For the record, mildew/bleach spray close to their most likely routes around the house, last thing before going to bed and just before they start moving around, has worked remarkably well. It disrupts scent trails and is probably quite irritating to their smell and respiration. In fact, I think they may even be next door’s problem now: they claim to have humane traps, but given that I can almost sleep through the scritching of tiny mouse paws by my head, then I fully intend to ignore any sharp, distant snapping sounds I might hear. It’s probably just the wind.
You never know, what with the weather the mice may have left your gaff for a ski holiday.
In the interests of transparency I have to admit that the letting agents sent a man around, and he’s put down something that will apparently make them go to sleep back in their nest, eventually permanently, without them suffering unduly. I don’t know yet how I feel about this.