Saturday, November 25, 2006

Rat

Today my dad became an official hero. Since Wednesday, we've been smelling what can only be described as a shitty smell in our toilet. Now I know a toilet is occasionally meant to smell of shit. Maybe only the Queen's smells of roses all the time. For the rest of us great unwashed...

Anyway, on Thursday I remarked that our landscape gardener Lee must have dumped an enourmously stinking load because, I said, it whiffed like the portable khazis you find at festivals. On Friday, it had got worse. By the evening, when we returned from work, Mrs D/D noticed that the small had moved into the living room. Now, in east London, it seems the majority of bathroosms, like ours, are situated downstairs. Ours is no exception, and therefore, the back wall of the bathroom seperates the downstairs cupbarod in our house. Oh fuck, we both though as it dawned on us what it might be. Its dead rat.

And behold, that's what it was. We've have rats every year for five of the seven we've lived here - we've even named them. Rufus, Reinhardt, and ths year, Roland. We've laid various baits over the years and usually they just disappear and the munching rats die somewhere else. This year's monster has been quite troublesome though. First, it munched through the wiring in our central heating boiler, more-or-less maiming it at a cost of £217. Then it ate quite a lot fo food in the kitchen. Because we've got Nicki, the ratfood eating guide beast, we needed bait a dog could not feed on, so we took the normally reliable but loose Rentokil bait away this year and replaced it with solid bait in a plastic box, whose admittance holes are too small to allow a dog to investigate too closely. In the meantime, I'd bought a bottle of Bayer granules which i left under the kitchen sink for a rainy day. Well that bottle had been bitten into and most of the contents consumed. On the side of the bottle, it says in large friendly letters "kills up to 20 rats". And that, I think, is what killed ours.

For under the bath, large as death and twice as ugly was Roland. He was very smelly, and about a minute after being found, was also very cooked as our garden incinerator cremated him. Roland, RIP. Stinking bastard.

So my dad gets a huge thanks for finding him and disposing of the cunt.



Not Roland, but they all look the same, don't they?

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