With few exceptions today was a perfect day. It’s been a good week in all: work was enjoyable; I bought Michele a 512M MMC for her new 6230 – she wanted an MP3 player and it does a stonkingly good job; had a few good evenings with the Goldsmiths die hards (Llynos is leaving next week – we’re shrinking!); got a lot of overdue sleep; after being introduced by a friend I became a devoted follower of Flying Spaghetti Monsterism; that sort of thing.
But today was idyllic. We’d arranged to give my mum a week off from cooking her wonderful Sunday dinners in favour of a family kebab take-away. The weather was so, so beautiful it defies description. It was one of these blue-skies and golden sunshine affairs that is not only nice to look at, but life affirming. So we took Humph over with us and sat in the garden. Humph generally seems to get a lot out of being in that garden as do the rest of us. Especially with a couple of bottles of wine and a bottle of cheap Cava.
My dad and I went up the road to get the food and, following in a long family tradition, he went to the pub to order a couple of pints while I sorted out the kebabs. The understanding kebab shop owners are happy to give the food a load of TLC while we relax in the “Bankers Draft” (or “Brewers Droop” as my dad calls it). By the time I’d caught up with him in the pub he’d pulled! These two paraletic Canadian women who, after realising that they might have had a tad too much, had wisely switched to drinking halves….two at a time. I was happy with my Wetherspoons priced pint of “Waggledance” – named, according to the elder of the two women, after the “Hokey pokey” and she was kind enough to demonstrate how it worked. We reflected on the effect that all-day sunday opening has had on drinking habits and considered what 24hour opening would do…hmm
Anyway, we got back with the grub and ate in the garden as the sun went down while Humph attacked her millet-seeds with avian gusto. It all felt perfect!
My poor sister passed-out en route to a job interview this week and woke up on the platform of Lewisham station covered in blood. She had to have stitches. Her majesty’s constabulary [don’t they do a wonderful job ladies and gentlemen] didn’t bother letting our parents know she was in the hospital, leaving the duty a very kind bloke, apparently a bigwig at HSBC, who took her to the hospital and made sure she was ok. By the time we saw her today the scars were healing but she still looked like she’d had a crappy week 🙁
When we got back home we discovered our carefully baited traps has caught the mouse. The beautiful, furry little mouse. The mouse that I had managed to corner earlier this week and let go because I couldn’t bare to kill him in cold blood. Poor, terrified little thing.
So he’s been keeping us awake at night running around the bedroom and he’s been a keen eater of parrot food. The humane traps we’ve tried are so humane that they act as mouse-feeders, so we bought some mean cartoon-style snappy ones. So far these too have provided his evening meals. We wake up to find them surrounded by the detritus from a great meal..crumbs, seed hulls, a little brandy glass and some almost microscopic cigar butts… So today I set up a trap/bait configuration that couldn’t fail…and it didn’t. Poor, beautiful little thing.
As I was disposing of him and the trap I kept trying to reassure myself that he would have died instantly. Unlike the long drawn out, painful deaths of poison or, worse, glue-traps. Doesn’t really make me feel better though. Poor little sod was just trying to survive…like the rest of us…