And another one....

Later I’m in the kitchen trying to make tea when suddenly S yells at me from the front room. When I get there, he says ‘I think I’ve got one trapped under my foot’ and sure enough there is a bit of a tail sticking out. He says he saw it come in the room through the corner of his eye and race towards the under bench area where his feet are when he’s sitting there. He says he stamped his foot in an attempt to deter it and hopefully frighten it back out again and somehow actually managed to stamp on it. He thinks it dead, and I should get the shovel which is still outside the back door. I fetch it back in but just as I’m going towards the door from the kitchen to the hall I see ANOTHER ONE which dashes under the cooker. At this rate we’ll be overrun before the day’s out.

In the front room S tells me to slide the shovel underneath it which I do and we manage to get it on to the shovel. What to do now? It’s dark and getting late, so S tells me to throw it into the road as far as I can, which I do. (Bit too far actually, it’s between parked cars on the other side of the road – it’s still there three days later – so evidently no cat wants to claim it for its own and no car’s going to run it over either.) Back inside there’s the little matter of the blood on the carpet, which as I’m the one with the Marigolds, seems to be my job.

S finds piece of wood that he can use to block entrance to the front room (there being too many things piled up inside the door to be able to just actually shut the door which would be the more solid option) so now we have to hurdle in and out of the room

Next clean blood off the trap that worked, get screwdriver out to finely tune the angle of the plate (after it had been well and truly flattened) and load up more chocolate (luckily an earlier tidy up session to remove possible food sources had uncovered a Quality Street tin which by now was past its sell by date, but still contained all the varieties that no-one likes – so plenty of bait available). The priming of rat traps is an extremely fine art, and I have by now the bruises to prove it.

Go to bed, shutting all available doors.