Email from my Brother: poo and mice this week!

Hi  Fay,

How are things going in your part of the world?  I’m writing to you moments after finding out that our fencing guy may have driven a gate post through the pipe that links our house to our septic tank.  How do we know this?  There’s a suspiciously large puddle forming a few metres away from the back door.  It doesn’t yet have any turds floating in it because they’ll apparently come up in the brand new shower tray in our brand new bathroom.  Yay us!

And we paid extra for a low profile shower tray.  There’s no lip on that mutha and it’s near flush with the floor. I’m ruing the day we decided on that.  It’s going to be poops ahoy as they wash over the Italian floor tiles and lap up against the free standing vanity unit.  Do you remember that scene from “The Shining” where the lift doors open and gallons of blood wash out into the hotel corridor?  I’m thinking that but with frappéd shit.

After going so long without a bathroom there has been a certain pleasure in taking long hot showers.  Not anymore.  Now it’s a gamble of how quick can you shower before you realise you’re paddling in sewage.  I’m thinking that maybe we should get the pipe fixed.

Juliette’s dad says I should dig down and find out where the break is then dig a run off trench to another part of the paddock to take the shitty water to.  Then I can call in some drain layers to but in a new bit of pipe.  I’m dry retching just thinking about how bad that’s going to be.  I’m thinking full Hazmat suit, the ones with those unnecessarily large and really fragile looking head pieces.  You know the ones, they’re yellow rubber, all tight fitting around the wellies and gloves but come the helmet bit it looks like it was designed to fit over the head of a It’s A Knockout foam novelty character.  They also have what looks like a vacuum cleaner pipe coming out of the back of the head piece for you to breathe through and that hooks up to a backpack full of potpourri or something.  No doubt I’ll just have to dig it out in jeans and a hoodie though.

We also have a bit of a mouse problem.  Just the one mouse I think.  I’d seen it skirting around the place out of the corner of my eye for a couple of weeks now.  It’s tiny, about the size of my thumb.  It’s a little brown field mouse.  Tom caught it last Saturday in an amazing display of speed and dexterity (he actually caught it about five times because he kept letting it go just to give the poor creature a bit of a chance).  Juliette had to take the mouse off Tom and she dropped it outside the back door.  Usually you’d want to take it off somewhere a bit further but it was cold, dark and raining.

So last night I’m asleep, deep asleep, Inception dream Level 3 at least, and Juliette wakes me up to tell me that a mouse has run across her back and was walking along the headboard.  No this is true, mice do this because there was this one time in Jersey when a mouse tried to make a nest in Juliette’s hair three times in one night.  So I switch on the lights and make a show of looking for a tiny mouse that I'm never going to see without my contact lenses in before I flop back into bed and going back to sleep.  I’m just drifting off when I hear the scritching sound of tiny mouse feet running across the top of the headboard for myself.  So I leap up, switch the light on and there’s the mouse, in mid pose, ready to leap into Juliette’s hair for the second time.  Not really.  I heard the mouse but just went back to sleep.  

If a mouse can climb up onto our headboard and run along it in the dark he’s obviously up to something more awesome than just hanging around in the kitchen looking for crumbs.  I want to see what this mouse is doing.  I suspect he’s going for Juliette’s jewellery  tree.  Just one more job and he can finally retire to Rio.

We could of course just let Tom the cat sleep in the house at night and let him catch the mouse but if there’s just one thing Tom and Jerry cartoons have taught us it’s that as soon as you leave a cat in all night they’ll be playing Jazz records with their zoot suited cat buddies and breaking the place up quicker than you can say "Hey Toots!".  So Tom stays out.

Take care,

Love,

Mark xxx

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Hey you, as always