Mouse Hunt

I had hoped to spend the final week before Ash Wednesday doing a sort of digital Shrove Tuesday, prior to a fanfiction fast. 

Giving up eggs, meat and milk for Lent isn’t really too much of a hardship for me these days.  After all, there are plenty of meals I like that don’t involve them.  Giving up eating sweet things like biscuits and chocolate at work – or the cheesy tortilla bake that we usually share at Dungeons & Dragons – would be tougher, but I can manage – I think.  And we would need to allow ourselves the odd day off anyway, with Mothering Sunday and PDB11’s birthday in Lent.  (This year, my birthday falls on Good Friday, so I think I’ll postpone celebrating it until Easter Monday.)

But if I was really going to take on a difficult task, then spending less time on fanfiction – both reading and writing it – and finding time for meditating, reading serious books, and writing blog posts about what (if anything) I had learned, would be far more of a challenge.  And if I was going to do that, then I wanted to spend as much time as possible catching up on writing fanfiction now, before I took a break.

Of course, life got in the way.  Specifically, one small, furry life.

I knew that we had a mouse in the kitchen again.  This happens periodically, usually when we get careless about leaving an enticingly crumb-laden breadboard on the worktop where the mouse can reach it.  Then it’s just a matter of capturing the mouse

and releasing it a fair distance away, preferably with at least one busy main road between the release location and our house, in the hope that the mouse will stay put. 

In reality, as PDB11 points out, the mouse will probably get eaten by an owl.  But I hope that, in terms of keeping natural ecosystems and food chains going, this is a more meaningful death than having one’s neck broken by an old-fashioned spring-loaded trap, and less painful than being poisoned.

Of course, humane traps are only humane if we check them every couple of hours and release rodents as soon as possible.  The one time that I accidentally left a trap activated overnight, I came down in the morning to find a pathetic dead mouse stretched out in the trap. 

I suspect that what kills mice who are left too long in a live trap is not starvation.  After all, they have to hide out of the way during the daytime when we are around, and research on captive mice has shown that mice who are fed only on alternate days tend to be healthier than those given unlimited access to food. 

Rather, my guess is that trapped mice die from sheer terror.  Having accidentally done that to one mouse, I don’t want to risk it happening again.

Some mice are better than others at evading traps.  A few years ago, we had one which successfully stole the bait from any trap I put out, and was so cheeky that I frequently saw it sitting on the kitchen table or worktop in broad daylight.  I eventually got rid of that one when it got so over-confident that I managed to catch it with my bare hands.

The most recent intruder was not so much of an expert.  For a while, it ignored the trap, but this was probably because I had decided that peanut butter was too passé as a bait and that the mouse might appreciate muesli for a change.  After several days of getting nowhere with muesli, I put a piece of bread spread with peanut butter in the trap this morning, and had a mouse by lunchtime.

However, this mouse had distinguished itself in a different field.  I am used to mice getting onto the worktop, and into the ground-level drawer where we keep saucepans (not that there is anything for them to eat there, but that doesn’t stop them contaminating the pans with droppings).  This one, however, was the first I had seen that had managed to get onto the high shelves in the larder, to gnaw open plastic bags containing bread, pasta, and nuts (which was why I had thought that nutty muesli might appeal to it). 

So I not only had to take the mouse out and release it, and disinfect the worktops.  I also needed to take out any food from the larder that wasn’t in a tin and transfer it to a high-level cupboard,

and take out every utensil from the larder and the pan drawer and wash them.  And then I needed to work out where to put them when I’d washed them, before the clutter on the worktop provided an enticing network of sheltered tunnels for another mouse.

Taking everything out made me realise how much stuff we have, and how little of it we actually use regularly.  I have to admit that PDB11 is right that our kitchen does need more storage units that can shut things firmly away from mice.  But we also need to go through and decide what we actually use often enough for it to be worth keeping, what to give away, and what to throw away.  Do I need an old tin with a lid that doesn’t fit that once contained a chocolate Easter egg, and a vacuum flask with a broken stopper?  No.  Do we need a tea service patterned with pictures of Chinese dragons?  Well – we use the plates and saucers quite frequently for serving nibbles at parties, so they’re probably worth hanging onto, even if we don’t bother with the teapot and the tiny – and cracked – cups.

Spending Sunday sorting through stuff doesn’t feel either particularly fun or particularly spiritual.  But perhaps it is a helpful lead-in to Lent.  Maybe I need not just a spiritual de-cluttering of my mind, but a literal, practical de-cluttering.  After all, many religions emphasise that practical tasks can be an exercise in mindfulness.  As George Herbert wrote, ‘Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws,/ Makes that and th' action fine.’  And certainly makes the room less tempting for mice.