19 MAY 2007, Page 26

I felt sorry for the mice — and then they messed with my Chinese sea-grass carpet

Iresisted mouse glue for a long time. ‘Mouse’ and ‘glue’ are words that should not, sanely, sit together. They speak of a world where all the parameters have changed, a world of budgie staples and dog sharpeners. I wanted none of it.

I have a friend who scatters the stuff all around her home in northern France. She visits every six months and collects up the many withered mouse skeletons glued around her skirting-boards. Mouse glue is, as the name suggests, glue intended for mice. It lives, in the form of a paste, inside a cardboard funnel with the words ‘Mouse Glue’ on the outside. It smells, softly, of cheese.

In the ten years I have lived in London, I have had all manner of pests. Fleas came first. They were fun. They were left behind by the previous occupants of a rather grim flat above a sushi restaurant in Brixton, who were, I think, Etonians to a man. The fleas weren’t the worst thing they left behind (that honour goes to the syringe under the sofa) but they were still pretty upsetting. You could pull up your sleeve over the black carpet on the stairs, and they would patter up to your arm, like topsy-turvy rain.

Then there were the cockroaches. I didn’t like them at all. Them and their horrible alien persistence. This was in another flat and, again, was the fault of a previous occupant. The man from Rentokil said it was probably because she was from the Middle East, and we weren’t sure if he was right, or racist, or both. They also faced glue, in similar little cardboard tubes, but I gather that was a monitoring thing.

It is our own flat this time, our first. Complete with an Ikea kitchen that looks as if it comes from somewhere else, and a really rather expensive Chinese sea-grass carpet. And now, also, complete with mice. It’s always on the second mouse that you start to worry, isn’t it? The first, you convince yourself, could be some sort of rodent pioneer, a Christopher Columbus of mice, seeking a new world. When the second takes an insouciant strut through your living-room, you know you have a problem.

I have killed many things in my life, some with my bare hands. Neither fish nor fowl had prepared me for the sound of a mouse having his back broken by a bit of wire. A snap, a flip, and then far, far too many seconds of scrabbling. We sat on the sofa, my wife and I, ashen-faced, hands over mouths. It can’t have helped, I suppose, that we were simultaneously watching Jack Bauer being tortured by Red China in 24. We were Red China. It had shiny bulging black eyes, like little beads. Awful.

Suddenly, everyone has mice. Suddenly, everyone wants to talk about them. I have one colleague who delights in emailing me photographs of every mouse hole he finds in the House of Commons. With another, I discuss preventative measures. Mouse glue, we have always agreed, is a bit much. No fully functioning human can be OK with mouse glue. What do you do with a halfdead mouse stuck to a bit of cardboard? Do you stamp? I don’t like to think about it.

Cats, I suppose, inflict worse suffering upon the mouse, but at least they are natural. (Where do vegans stand on cats? Must check.) Although the problem with cats, I gather, is their insufferable pomp. They don’t do humility. For every mouse caught, you have a month of a cat taking itself terribly seriously, pouncing into corners and carrying itself with an air of mission. I’m not sure I could deal with that.

In itself, though, isn’t urban middle-class mouse fascination a fascinating thing? If we lived in jungle, or tundra, or the bits of North America that agoraphobics write books about, we would probably swap brave battle tales about lions, or bears, or wolves. As it is, we live in cities. We talk about mice. Fleas, ticks and cockroaches are too shameful and make people edge away. Rats just don’t sound that much fun. Mice, though, mice we can handle.

Anyway, as all serial killers would proba bly agree, every death gets a little easier. In time, in our flat, there was peace. We put the traps away and blocked off the holes.

Then, after about a month of nothing, I awoke to the sound of scrabbling. I tried to ignore it. I convinced myself it was the wind. Eventually, though, I emerged into the hallway. And there was a hole. In the carpet. The virtually new, really rather expensive Chinese sea-grass carpet. So. Now it is war. Now it is mouse glue. Humanity be damned.

Incarceration, obviously, wouldn’t work with mice. Does it work with celebrities? According to her original sentence, Paris Hilton (the hotel heiress and logical conclusion of modern America) is due to start a 45-day stretch in a couple of weeks. From any perspective, she deserves it. She was pulled over twice for driving with a suspended licence. In California you can probably get the chair for less.

Yet it unsettles me. It unsettled me when Aitken went down, and Archer too. People forget, but in 2003 that great prison-dodger Pete Doherty (the boyfriend of Kate Moss and logical conclusion of modern Britain) actually went to jail for a while. Even that unsettled me, and I had barely heard of him. Next time (there will be a next time) I expect to be distraught.

Why so? It might be a poor idea to break a butterfly on a wheel, but Archer and Aitken surely make for poor butterflies. No, I suspect it is actually a sort of vicarious nimbyism. Most of us prefer to think of the convicted as bad sorts, not the type we would let into our houses, even through the medium of a glossy magazine. When it happens to someone we know, or at least know of, perhaps we are confronted with how horrible a thing prison really is. A bit like seeing a mouse in a trap. In a way.

Although perhaps I am wrong to worry. Last year the American actress Michelle Rodriguez, who played a (necessarily) brief role in the television drama Lost, was jailed for driving under the influence. ‘It was so cool,’ this particular butterfly wrote afterwards. ‘I love people, and it was a primal crew. The only thing that keeps them going is fighting for salt and making dice out of soap.’