Sound on/off
Twice as Mice
« Return to Posts Published on 12/03/09 04:18PM by Maxine CottonYou’d think I’d be used to mice by now. Living on a farm where there are feed bins and and lots of warm places to bed down,they are ever present. Yes I know they are vermin but I was always rooting for Jerry and not Tom, and as long as they don’t bother me, I generally leave them alone. I have forgiven them for eating my cashmere cardigan which I had lovingly stored in tissue paper along with other clothes I was too fat to squeeze into during pregnancy. I even let them off when they ate their way through the bottom of my sofa where they had been living on leftover sweets and crisps kicked under there by my children (I now have a lovely cleaner who moves things!!) But not anymore. Nope. Its no more Mr Nice Guy, well Mrs actually, because as of today I have officially declared war on our farm’s mice.
It’s been brewing. For the past 6 months they have stepped up their campaign of terror. It started with the hole they made in our family tent - I took it to be repaired.
“where were you storing it?” asked Glenda, the lovely woman who repairs things for me.
“err.. in one of our outside buildings” I said, knowing that she was going to lecture me..
“Well, there you are then” she said shaking her head...”asking for trouble.”
As I wasn’t prepared for it to sit permanently on our kitchen table, she suggested I put it in a tough bag and hang it up high in the barn. Difficult as it weighs a ton ,but I did it for the sake of my tent and also because if it actually did fall down, hopefully it would take out a couple of hungry looking mice sitting underneath it. Anyway, fast forward a couple of weeks and they had not only eaten through the bag, but through the fly sheet, the tent AND the ground sheet. Disaster. To make matters worse, they had also chewed through the rolled up matting which we use for our party marquee, so that when we unrolled it, it resembled something Tony Hart might have included in his art gallery during his Vision On days....
These are not the only possessions they have been attacking. Our huge Transit minibus appears to have become a refuge for homeless mice. They have nibbled through the spongey leather bit around the base of the gear stick, shredded blankets, eaten their way through the foam base of our car seats and generally pooed everywhere. They even enjoy free days out and regularly catch a lift on the school run. Last Thursday , as I braked outside school, one flew out from underneath the back of the van and scurried across the road. I resisted the urge to run it over as that’s just not very Glastonbury. The final straw came just a few days ago. A family trip to the reclamation Yard turned sour when the boys noticed Ruby holding what seemed to be a lollypop on a stick which she’d found in her baby seat. The screams were deafening when they realised that the lollypop was in fact a mouse with rigor mortis. I spent hours scrubbing that seat.
When we lived in London the rules were clear. If there was evidence of a mouse, then the exterminator was called in and that was that.. Here my relationship with mice has not been so straight forward. Well not until now anyway. So finally, and it is with some regret, I have come to the conclusion that the only good mouse is a dead mouse.