Country life
Bad manners
Leanda de Lisle
The modern mouse is a special breed. In the future they may come to be known as Mandelson Mouse, sharing, as they do, the same tastes as the Northern Ireland secretary. I became aware of them quite recently when I visited the larder and dis- covered they had ignored our Stilton in favour of eating our avocados. Not only that, they had spat the skin out all over the place, with just the kind of ill manners one has come to expect from the New Estab- lishment.
It would be true to say that we are the possessors of a particularly scary Stilton. Strange gases and a horrible brown liquid have been leaking out of it ever since we bought it, at a vastly inflated price, at the Calf and Lamb Society's auction. However, I feel sure that a mouse with any fondness for tradition would have been delighted by a cheese that is so obviously alive with bac- teria. It is sad to discover that the mice of the millennium spurn it. Besides changing their diet, they have moved out of the skirting-board into a home that is both more up market and more in tune with the zeitgeist.
Freshly arrived from the Ocean cata- logue, our new suede cushions helped give the drawing-room the kind of contempo- rary look that got Peter Mandelson's infa- mous house in Notting Hill a place in the pages of Vogue. Everyone admired them,
but only the mice insisted on nesting in them, nibbling great holes in the soft beige skin so they could bed down on the feathers within. It was more than a little galling to find my fashion statements abused in this way, but the last straw came when the mice decided to venture into modern technology and play around with my computer.
My electronic mouse had been trying to warn me something was up for weeks. It kept jamming for no apparent reason but you expect that with computers. ignored the problem until one morning my computer refused to switch on and I was left with no choice but to take it to a PC hospital. There they opened it up and found it had been so choked by little hairs the processor had burnt out. They asked whether I owned any pets, but while we do have a dog, he rarely ventures into my office. The blame, I feel sure, lay with some other furry friends.
I don't know whether modern mice feel that they should be given the same access to the Internet that Tony Blair is promising schoolchildren, or whether they were sim- ply hackers. Either way I understand why the Conservative party chairman, Michael Ancram, blew his top when he found their computers had been broken into. It was clear the time had come to call in Dave the rat man.
Dave is certainly a force for conser- vatism, being, as he is, a firm believer in the hereditary principle. His father was a pest controller and so, despite his real hor- ror of vermin, he became one too. Unfor- tunately, Dave says he is too busy to come to see me straight away. The country, apparently, is simply overrun with mice at the moment. This plague of vermin has the same root causes as the proliferation of New Labour voters: a remarkable fecundity and a balmy climate. We can only pray for a cold snap. It will be uncomfortable for all of us, but we will, at least, be able to con- sole ourselves that mouse numbers will drop dramatically. Meanwhile, Dave has promised to come here as soon as he can to 'check the whole house out'. I wondered how he did that. Perhaps he checked for droppings?
I can't tell mouse droppings from bat droppings and so I'm loth to put poison wherever I find them. Dave is rather more expert, of course, but it transpires he has a preferred method of mouse hunting. 'I can smell them,' he told me with a shudder. I'm impressed — but I frankly doubt he'll smell anything other than Stilton in the larder — and, while I'm prepared to wait for him to clear the house of mice, I'm going to do something about that larder myself. My trap consists of a small piece of polenta with our very large whole Stilton suspend- ed above it. With luck it's only a matter of time before our modern mice tuck into the River Cafe-style bait and feel the cheesy hammer of history fall on their shoulder with extreme prejudice.
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