Farewell to an old friend

I didn’t really know what to write for this blog. Things are trundling along here – one day follows another, one power cut follows another, one meal of pasta follows another. Nothing new.

And then I remembered the rat.

For the week before I went to Addis, I was putting down the rat poison mum had sent me and attempting to rid my house of George, the rat, and Rita, Sue and Bob, the mice. It seemed to work, as the number of mice I saw scuttling around was greatly reduced, and no mouse came to help me cook. Hurrah!

However, even though he was eating the poison I was putting down, I could still hear George gnawing away in the top of my wardrobe at night. The noise continued to keep me awake, and although I called ‘die, damn you’ every time I heard him, he still didn’t (die, that is). But then I went to Addis for a week and a half and didn’t think anything more of it.

When I came back, I put all my stuff in the living room and, with A. and Ab., did a quick sniff-check around the house. Everywhere was okay except my bedroom – oh my goodness, the smell! It was a terrible, terrible smell … even worse than my old socks which, as my family will tell you, is fairly bad.

Ab. conveniently had somewhere to be, which left A. and I to brave the stink and look for the dead rat which we guessed had expired somewhere in my wardrobe.

Luckily the clothes in my wardrobe were free of rat corpse, but as A. started to take out all of the stuff (which belongs to someone else) from the top cupboard, the smell got stronger and eventually, a furry mass was indeed discovered. There was a lot of girly shrieking from both me and A., particularly when we saw that the rat was crawling with maggots!

So we did what we always do in a crisis – call H., the guard’s son. He came and scooped the rat up in a piece of paper and took it to its final resting place; the rubbish heap behind A.’s house. Meanwhile, A. and I started to scoop maggots out of the wardrobe with a dustpan and brush.

We were a pretty picture – standing on chairs, rubber gloves on, trying not to drop wriggling maggots on the floor, and carrying them outside at arms length.

But the good news is, George is finally dead, and I don’t have any more mice in my house! Woo hoo!