I have finished the ironing.
I would like to be massively relieved, but actually there is no possibility of being triumphalist about it. First, the ironing has unavoidably drawn to my attention the colossal mess in the attic, in which a visitor will be sleeping in a very few weeks’ time, and second, there are so many other jobs still waiting that there is absolutely no time even to look around and feel smug.
I should have put all the beautifully flattened clothes away in the wardrobe, but since I have got to pack them all again next week there didn’t seem very much point. I will just wait until the day when I get round to unearthing the suitcase and put them all in there.
I considered doing it this afternoon but they would only get creased again.
It has been a wet, horrid sort of day, another four-handkerchiefer. It started late because I have worked at the nightclub for the last couple of nights, and hence not come home until nearly dawn. Oliver does not come home until long after dawn, and had to be woken up this afternoon at half past five in order to get ready for work by six.
You will be pleased to hear that the dogs’ haircuts seem to have bestowed a new lease of life upon them, and they have been bounding around like puppies, chasing one another up and down the muddy fell sides and barking at anybody else’s dog that they happen to see. There are not many of these. Fell walking is limited to a very few hardened idiots in this weather. We all know one another, and tell each other how wet it is, helpfully, when we encounter each other splashing grimly through the mire.
I was not sorry to get home, into the quiet of the house, away from the lashing rain and wind. We have had a rat in the conservatory over the last week. I could not blame it for wishing to be out of the vileness of the Lake District climate, but it has been digging up the flower beds and it has chewed through the wire for the lights. I explained this to Mark on the phone, and he said that it was very probably living in the conservatory and might have been there for some time. He said that I had to do something before it found its way into the house, so I did.
On Friday night I put poison down in the flower beds.
I hated myself for this. Of course it is only a rat, but presumably it had a little ratty life that it was enjoying and that mattered to it, even if it was just living behind the washing machine and breakfasting on household wiring. I do not like rats at all, one jumped out of the compost heap at me the other night, which presumably gave both of us a nasty fright, but just not liking them is no excuse for murder. Also poisoning things is a horrid thing to do. It gets into the food chain, and soon you are responsible for the death not only of a family of rats, but also of a family of owls as well. Probably you have got to explain yourself when you die, so you had jolly well better have a good excuse, I think.
All the same, Mark was right, it would be in the house in no time, and before long it would have a little ratty wife and dozens of little ratty babies, and they would be nesting in the wardrobes and under the beds and eating out of the larder before we even knew it. Anybody who has read the dreadful cautionary Tale of Tom Kitten knows that rats are not a good thing to have in your house.
There are no owls in our garden, so I hoped it would be all right.
I put the poison down in the plant-beds, out of the reach of Rosie, who is easily tempted, and who narrowly escaped a very nasty misfortune with a baited trap once.
When I got up in the morning it was all gone, every last bit, and I had put a lot down in case we had a big family of rats there already.
I felt dreadful.
Poor rat.
I have absolutely no business to feel dreadful, it is absolutely my own fault for deliberately slaughtering a creature which was living under my roof, but I do. It was a horrid thing to do, and worse, with an unhappy sigh, I put some more poison down that very night.
That is still there today, and so perhaps there really was only one rat.
I am very sorry that I did it, but really it had got to be done.
I will apologise to it when I get to the afterlife.
LATER NOTE: I am horrified to say that I do not need to apologise to at least one rat, because it is still there. It ran across the conservatory tonight when I came in.
All the fresh poison had gone, so I put some more down, but either there are a lot of rats or one immune one. I do not think there are a very lot of them because I haven’t heard them, and rats are dreadfully noisy, so I think that they must be getting in somewhere, probably through the wall between the conservatory and next door.
Funnily enough, I do not feel nearly as bad about rat mass-murder as I did about killing one solitary rat.
There must be a hole in the wall somewhere.
This is going to have to be a job for Mark.
