I am on the taxi rank by myself.
There is nobody around at all, no taxis, and no customers.
It is so quiet that the pub across the road has given up and gone home, and were it not that I had not yet got round to writing to you, I would have considered very carefully the possibility of doing the same.
I might go home soon anyway. I have really had enough.
I have had another busy day. I have not yet quite got around to doing the thing I really need to do, which is to finish creating the Christmas cards, but I am another step closer. Today I have watered and scrubbed out the ratty conservatory.
I have now bricked up a couple of potential sites for rat-ingress, and am feeling moderately confident that they will not get in again. I have watered all of the flower beds until everything is moist and acid soil-smelling. Then I swept and scrubbed and swilled everything else over with bleach and boiling water, and I think that I might have achieved hygienic tranquillity once more.
There was rat poo. I had to bleach the sweeping brush afterwards as well.
We think that the problem has been an explosion in the Windermere rat population. There have been several in the yard lately, possibly because we had a relatively mild winter last year. Also of course any area with lots of restaurants built above Victorian cellars is going to have rats, which is the case in the street next to ours. Then obviously they are going to explore and settle near anywhere with an interesting compost heap, which we certainly have.
I am not getting rid of the compost heap. It is a very useful resource indeed, providing endless loaded wheelbarrows of excellent soil. The rats are good for the compost. They churn it up and process it into poo, which is also good for the flower beds, if not for the carpets.
The thing is that I think there are probably quite a lot of them, and they have been expanding their area of operation, rather like Uber.
I suggested to Mark that we get a cat. We are contemplating this. The thing is that it would need to be a savage rat-catcher, not some namby-pamby weed with a silky coat and an entitled attitude, which does seem to describe a lot of cats these days. It would need to earn its keep.
I don’t suppose that it would, any more than the dogs do.
You will not be surprised to learn that the dogs have finally discovered the Christmas tree. That is to say, they have discovered that some chocolates have fallen off it on to the floor. You will recall that any chocolate which is on the floor belongs to the dogs by traditional ancient rights, and they have begun to exercise those rights enthusiastically. When I came in from work last night there was a small nest of chocolate wrappers on their cushion.
They consume them by holding the wrapped chocolates in their mouths until they become all warm and liquid. Then they bite a hole in the wrapper and slurp the chocolate out of it. Roger Poopy eats more than Rosie because he mostly wins the fights over them, Rosie keeps getting distracted and as soon as she looks the other way then Roger pounces and her chocolate is lost. We know that he has done this because she starts to wail at the sadness of such a terrible loss.
Occasionally I have taken pity on her and chucked her a replacement chocolate.
I will remind you again that I am perfectly well aware that in our modern world we have become convinced that chocolate is poisonous for dogs, presumably we have been encouraged to think so by some large manufacturer of dog treats. However, they were both still perfectly alive this morning, if they die then I will be happy to admit I was wrong but I don’t think I need to bother saving up for another one just yet.
I have told them they can have some walnuts next time I go to Booths. That is their other Christmas present. They can have those before Christmas because the shells are an absolute nuisance when they have been scrunched up into painful shards and spread liberally all over the floor.
I will get some this week.
By Christmas I will have them all swept up and gone.
It will be the least of the dogs’ worries.
They are booked into a kennel when we go to then theatre next week.
Poor dogs.
