It's not so long ago that I was summoned to inspect a slumbering dormouse, which a colleague had accidentally disturbed. Muscardinus avellanarius - oh, it was a dear little creature, its minute paws clasped over its fat tummy and its bushy russet tail wrapped round its neck. Lonelymom, you wouldn't have been scared! It seemed fast asleep, as the team of six professional gardeners and I rushed about guiltily gathering material to reconstruct a dream new-build nest. But was it slumbering so deeply?lonelymom wrote: I don't like anything smaller than a cat (including guinea pigs, rabbits, fish etc - sorry to those who think they're cute). Actually it's not just that I don't like them, I'm frightened of them (including rabbits - I know, totally irrational!)
What did Lewis Carroll's Dormouse say?
"The Dormouse slowly opened its eyes, "I wasn't asleep" it said in a hoarse feeble voice, "I heard every word you fellows were saying".
I hope it was happy, when it eventually woke up, to find itself in a carefully constructed thoughtfully situated Ideal Bedroom.
I still consider it a horrendous experience - when I had a crawling baby and lived in the end of three small 1906 terrace houses "in need of modernisation" as the tactful surveyor put it - I heard a weird noise under a chair in the front sitting room and peered under. There was an enormous rat - raised hackles! meanly glowing eyes! bared teeth! - hissing at me. It must have come up through the floorboards? I screamed, grabbed the baby and ran. My current husband appeared, with nothing on.
"Under the chair!" I whimpered from a distance. "But don't go too close like that!" See? Even at a moment of extreme peril, I was mindful of his future reproductive capabilities. That rat's teeth were huge.
We crossed on the stairs - the baby and I seeking a place of safety, and my current husband (now in a pair of suitably protective and supportive pants) wielding my precious and expensive wedding-present Sabatier chopping knife and closely followed by the cat. Heroes, the pair of them! The rat was slain as it tried to climb the curtains, hissing and spitting venom to the last!
The corpse was buried at the bottom of the garden, and we told nobody. The Health Visitor went uninformed. The Sabatier knife was interred with its savage victim.
My lovely wedding present! But I'd never have been able to use it again!