Drink

Having mice in your house is just like having an STI. You feel certain that other people must surely have this problem too, and you look out for the signs; but you would never dream of admitting it first.

It is not good. In fact, it is by turns, horrific, vile and worthy of moving house for; but as my husband has pointed out, while I am unlikely to take these mice with me, my slovenly penchant for unhygienic mess is sure to travel and broadcast to any mice within in a mile of a new house to come and join the party.

I have become a bloodthirsty hunter; but only by proxy. For someone who has been a member of Medical Action for Global Security for years and is practically a pacifist, this is a bit of a change. I want those mice dead and I want it now. Believe me, I have tried the namby-pamby ultrasound kit, and the trap-your-mice-alive and then free-them-to-the –wild larks, but they don’t work. However, I am liberal about my double standards, as I certainly don’t want anything to do with traps and cheese and blood, and I definitely don’t want to get my hands dirty. Female emancipation has to have the line drawn somewhere. I don’t get out of bed in the morning until I know the score on the kill and that it is safe to go downstairs. If anything keeps me from divorce it is the thought that I would have to deal with these things myself, which, I find, is a strong motivating factor for love and contrition.

Unfortunately, though, last week someone’s bleep wasn’t working. A small problem with a battery it may have only been, but it resulted in one of the defining moments of my life, which, as Britney Spears would say, proved that when it comes to bravery, calmness and leadership qualities, I am a girl, not yet a woman. Because of a problem with getting hold of whoever was meant to be on call, my husband had to go in to the hospital at 4 am. This meant that I was the first to go downstairs in the morning. I faced a scene of carnage that made Pulp Fiction look like an episode of the Tweenies.

While I am certainly not the Queen of Cool, I have occasionally been known to be calm in a crisis, but these were other people’s ventricular tachycardias, not my own. Mice being executed in my kitchen though: that’s personal. In a panic, I had to phone my husband at work, to simultaneously screech blame at him for not having sorted it out by the time I got up, and also plead for help as to what to do. You may be eating and I don’t want to spoil your appetite, so I will stop there. Except to say that it was awful, truly awful, and I couldn’t read stories about Mr and Mrs Mouseling and their cute furry daughter Angelina Ballerina to my children for a week, such was my guilt. That, and the notes on a mousetrap that said to try and catch a few, as they lived in family groups…I could feel tears in my eyes.

It could be worse though; it could be rats, which are altogether more terrifying and definitely off even the most confidential of conversational topics. I am not basing this negative association on any fact, but rather I am taking my opinion from that helpful and accurate resource known as stereotype. I am presuming that since rats aren’t dressed up in clothes and talking in as many children’s books as mice are, then they must be from the bad end of town. That was until a friend pointed out that since rats are continent, you might not know you have them. This might be true, I thought, shivering, as I do know someone who only realised his rat infestation after investigating his oddly tasting tap water and found two rats decomposing in his water tank. And, my friend continued calmly, it is surely a blessing that mice have no anal sphincter, so that you therefore know if they have been to visit. (I am presuming if you were eating you stopped reading a while back: while I can discuss bowels with patients without flinching, the merest thought of rodent excrement frankly makes me nauseous.)

Actually, it couldn’t be worse. If you did have the incarnation of evil that are rats, I have heard that one phone call to the council will result in the arrival of a discreet unmarked vehicle who will come and do all your dirty work for you. Wheras the only local interest in mice comes from my neighbour hood cat, who is not at all impressed by my sudden burst of affection for him. No one mentions mice. Shops sell out of mousetraps but the buyers are stealthily anonymous. No one meets your eye in the pest control isle in hardware shops. At the checkout, assistants merely give you thin lipped smiles, while looking as you with hardened eyes, as though they are committing your guilty face to memory. I have delayed writing this column until I am sure the vermin are truly gone: I have friends coming for lunch tomorrow, one of whom I suspect reads this column, and I didn’t know if she would accept my assurances that all surfaces had been bleached and all floors mopped. Because basically, you know, deep down these mice have made me feel unclean. All in all, it is just like I imagine having an STI would be, except, obviously, without the sex or the contact tracing. But in retrospect, if I had the choice, I would rather have the STI. At least then, the mice would be cured by one, painless, stat dose of azithromycin.