It is raining very hard indeed.
We splashed around the Library Gardens with the dogs, and then Mark splashed around for a while bringing wood in and cleaning the taxis.
I splashed over to the bank and back and then decided that it would be a good day to stay at home and do inside things.
All the excitement of the last few days seemed to have left me feeling rather worn and frayed at the edges, like the dogs’ favourite cushion, and everything seemed somehow to be very slow and difficult to achieve.
It is like that when we have had adventures sometimes, it takes a day or two to remember how to make life feel calm and joyful again. We lit a candle and played some cheerful music, and in between jobs sat quietly in the kitchen together and drank coffee.
We thought that it had been a difficult sort of week, because of having no money and then breaking down in the middle of the night and having an argument, and then being at somebody else’s house, and then seeing lots of people getting cross with one another, and then the worry about the boiler being broken in case we still had a cold house when the children got home. It was a good thing to sit down together and remember quietly that all of these things were over and that life was good again.
I did some hand-washing, which you have usually got to do when you have been smart for a day or two, and tidied things up and wiped things and put things away and watered the plants, and generally pottered about, trying to restore our feeling of calm and order to life. Mark filled the fireplace with logs for the newly installed boiler and went round the house letting all the air out of the radiators so that everywhere would be warm again.
We collected a parcel from the Post Office which had Oliver’s new school trousers in it, and then spent some time agonising about our current worrying difficulty, which is what to do about the mouse that has moved into the camper van and has chewed a little hole in my slippers.
We do not want a mouse living in the camper van, although we have had one before. The last one was an inoffensive sort of chap who kept himself to himself and lived quietly in the locker under the seat in the insulating material and popped outside through a hole in the floor whenever he needed to dine, and so we took no notice of him, and he travelled the world with us for several years.
This one, however, is a completely different sort of mouse. Apart from anything, we think that in the last two weeks it has invited all of its friends and family to live with it, and they are settled down in the locker at the back of the camper. These mice chew things and poo on the carpet, and so they will have to go.
The question is, of course, how we persuade them that their tenancy is up.
I do not at all like poisoning mice, partly because the occasional unpleasant hangover in the course of my lifetime has led me to believe that being poisoned is a fairly nasty way to go, but also because if we poison a mouse and then an owl eats it we would have poisoned the owl as well. Owls are very keen to eat poisoned mice, which are slow and unhappy because they don’t feel very well. If the mouse has eaten enough poison we might not just have killed the mouse and the owl, but also the fox or the badger that finds the dead owl as well.
With this in mind we hovered uncertainly in front of the Rodent Extermination shelves in the ironmonger’s shop for ages. In the end we decided on mouse traps, which are horrible savage things but are quick and do not kill anything else as well as the mouse. Mark said that he would go and set them in the camper van tomorrow and go and check them every day so that we don’t have dead mice lying around for ages making a smell.
I was grateful for this but can’t help that hope that the mice decide to go and live somewhere else before we have got to do this horrible thing. There are things that make a noise that are supposed to drive mice away, but because it is a camper van and not a house we do not have the right sort of electricity to plug one in, and Mark says that in his experience they don’t work anyway.
We bought four mouse traps, and they are sitting menacingly in a bag ready to go over to the camper tomorrow, it is not nice to have death sitting waiting there like that, and I feel terribly sorry for the mice, who after all are just getting on with their small, mousy existence. All the same I know we will kill them, because if we do not they will make our lovely camper smell of mouse wee, and they will eat everything we leave there, from our pillows to our dog food to the children’s chocolate, and soon I would not want to go in the camper because it would be chewed and ruined and not clean and fresh and safe any more.
It is a ruthless world sometimes, and we are being a ruthless part of it.
Poor mice.
