Why aren't there more Patagonian chinchillas in my life? In fact, what's with the total absence of rodents? There is a whole bowl of apples sitting, exposed, on my dining table, chewable electrical cords all over the shop, ample fluff, suitable for the nesting therein, delicious soap in the bathroom, more paper than a self-respecting mousie would know what to do with. This place is rat paradise. But do I see so much as a vanishing tail? A small pile of dried poo? A toothmark on the kettle cord?
I read somewhere once that there were five rats for every human in Moscow. Send some of them here! There are fifty humans for every rat.
I was always going to be a guinea pig wrangler when I grew up, but I don't think I've even seen a guinea pig in the last five years. There were a couple of dismembered mice in the back garden at Leichhardt (here's looking at you, Bruno), but mice don't cut it when there's a question of guinea pigs - or Patagonian chinchillas.
8 comments:
Dear LH, come on a sabbatical to Upper Gully where we can introduce you to Rodney Green - guinea pig extraordinaire - who seems to be training to grow up into a wombat with a diet of Amazonian rainforest. We rescued him from the pet python next door.
Blessings and bliss
Did the python starve?
I'll help you out and eat an apple.
Actually, once I whiled away a Saturday evening waiting for the train at Flinders Street while a rat ran in and out of the track dragging scraps of food hither and fro.
Of course, you can never tell with Australian rats. They just might be a rare specimen of the Great Melburnian Long-Necked Potoroo, with a short neck.
Still, Flinders Street: best place for becoming convivial with the rodents. Some of the train passengers aren't bad company, either.
Thanks, Miss E. Rodney got any friends looking for a home?
Tim, you're an unending source of tips for the aspiring rodent fraterniser. I'm not actually trying to get rid of the apples. They're $3 for 2 kg at the Thornbury Veg Emporium, and I've made them my staple. Half a dozen apples a day keep the whatsit away.
I recommend to your rodential delectation the upcoming animated film 'Ratatouille', or the older 'Willard' if you're of a darker frame of mind.
In one of the sadder episodes of my young life, my pet guinea pig, Basil (named after the Siberian hamster of Fawlty Towers fame), was unintentionally suffocated with a towel by a friend's small sister.
On a completely unrelated note, a friend of mine has found herself the proud owner of over 200 ripe oranges. Would you or your vegetarian leanings have any suggestions for disposal (eg recipe for marmalade made en masse)?
I wish, wish, wish I could be your marmalady, Jennifer, but I'm flat out of orange-depleting tricks. I did once make a tremendous batch of roughly chopped lemon marmelades, but I chucked the recipe as soon as I had five years' worth of goo arrayed before me. I remember it all involved obscene quantities of sugar and a lot of jar sterilization.
Ah, I just spent a fortnight sleeping in a barn with a family of charming dormice, liores en francais. I'm all for building bridges between humans and rodents.
Charming dormice! As the old saying goes, "When in France, do as the Franciscans do", which I'm sure means doling out your spare grain to the dormouses and other denizens of this world.
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