(rats in the walls…)
I could talk about this bloody lingering chest infection, which I seem to recall hung on for weeks last time as well. About the lack of sleep and the hallucinations, and the awful realisation that – had I been twenty years older – my “frail” body might not actually cope with this kind of stress. Luckily, as the athlete, I am, I live to suffer (cough cough cough).
I could jump on the bandwagon of comment around events at Cornell university, but while I am indeed outraged, it’s difficult to see what the voice of one more old white guy, in a different country, could add. The silence of the many, and the complete failure of morale courage, is perhaps the most disturbing of the many disturbing aspects.
My downstairs neighbours “Indian Takeaway” quit. After a small incident leaving gas on all night, it was also discovered that several fittings did not actually meet the required standard for gas safety. It has been immediately taken over and will now be a “Syrian Takeaway”. I wish them good luck, and as did the previous occupants, they have begun with a complete clearing , repainting and a siege of carpentry – it is (I’m told) , all going to be done correctly.
This ongoing housecleaning appears to have upset the terms of our “losing draw” with the rats, who have clearly been used to raiding their for supplies and are now required to forage further afield. This escalation has us deployed with traps at every corner within and without, and I’m now on my eighth bag of gravel for filing the one tunnel route we have identified. (Gravel, pea gravel, large pebbles, added steel wool, Gravel with sand, Gravel with paint ….). Every poison trap appears to get emptied on a daily basis (Yum yum) to no result. Recently they chewed through an entire floorboard (digging upward from below), and the lighting supply to the garage (I think).
With our (we are all ill in varying degrees) malaise and fatigue it has been difficult to cope with the focus to fight this with the perseverance it actually requires. Flame throwers, poison gas, nuclear weapons all seem like easy options. It’s possible that an unchecked gas build up and subsequent explosion might have done the trick (“where did all these rats come from?”)
Next week – Idiots guide to Making Phosgene gas in your kitchen
