Interruption

Writing has been interrupted by great ructions in the kitchen. I had suspected there were mice in the cupboard under the sink. The brown blobs could have been wild rice, but the smell was finally, unmistakably, mouse. Earlier in the week, I took everything out of the cupboard and inserted the cat, but although he sniffed about with interest, he didn’t actually do anything. So today I decided that I’d better get in there and do something about it myself. I discovered that not only had the mice been in the cupboard under the sink, but they had found their way into the adjoining cupboard, which contains drawers of pantry staples. Well, it did contain them, but the mice have had a field day in there amongst all the packages, and mostly what I found was wreckage and mouse poop. So now the shopping list contains a great number of replacement items, along with a note to do something about mouse-proof containers. I’ve also attempted to mouse-proof the cupboard by hammering a triple-thickness sheet of aluminium cut from an oven-liner over the gaping great chasm in the bottom of the cupboard. I assume this is where the mice have been getting in, as there appears to be nothing below it except the under-side of the house. The hole is perfectly circular, so presumably not cut by the mice themselves unless they have got the knack of power tools. I think the drain pipe must have once gone straight down through the bottom of the cupboard. Anyway, the hole is certainly big enough for the mice to have driven themselves through in bus-loads.

I will keep a close eye on it for the next little while. As for Avro, I think he can go on half rations for a while – maybe that will encourage him to get under the house and deal to the mice. He hunts everything else with enthusiasm……earlier in the week I got out of bed to discover that during the night he had left an enormous rat in the hallway outside the bedroom. It must have been quite a battle because the rat was underneath my over-turned bicycle. Interestingly, the rat was completely unmarked by tooth and claw, and this along with its wide-eyed look of dead astonishment leads me to conclude that Avro killed it by dropping the bike on it. He’ll have to use more standard killing techniques on the mice, because he’s not going to be able to drag the bike under the house…