I’m in with the house proud mouse crowd

I like things to be neat and tidy.

Half the fun of playing with toys as a kid was making sure I’d packed them neatly away in the box afterwards.

Take Monopoly; banknotes in denominational order, all the right way up and round. Property cards in the order they are around the direction of travel on the board (although I always had an existential crisis about the utility companies – mixed in with the streets, or grouped together as a set? I can feel my anxiety levels rising just thinking about it).

Thankfully, I’m all grown up now, and if you’re presuming that my record collection is filed in alphabetical order of artist, then sub-ordered by year of release, and that I iron my underpants then you’re wrong. Only one of those is true.

It’s comforting to know that it isn’t only other humans that have a need to keep things tidy. There’s a mouse near Bristol who seems to have taken it upon itself to keep Steve Mckears’ shed neat.

After mixing up some bird seed, Steve was surprised to find a random screw in the container, and couldn’t work out where it had come from.

The following day, there were more in there. Steve’s daughters cunningly sprinkled flour around the outside of the tub to help establish if something living was shifting screws, or perhaps a poltergeist. I’m not sure how the flour would have helped with the latter, but it was good to see them getting into the spirit of the occasion.

Discovering tiny footprints (and presumably discounting leprechauns) they concluded the visitor was from this earthly plane, and enlisted the help of photographer Rodney Holbrook.

Rodney is clearly a creature of the dark himself, as he was able to set up a motion-operated night vision camera, which detected a little mouse, tidying up in the dead of night. The rodent was determined too – attempting to shift object as big as itself into a tall ice cream tub.

Quite why the house proud mouse felt compelled to do this is unclear. I’ve had mice in my cellar before now (not a euphemism, by the way) and they did quite the opposite of tidy up. There’s a better class of rodent in Bristol, obviously.

Maybe it was collecting the assorted bits of metal, screws and wires to build a vacuum cleaner.

Anyway, I think I’ve found my spirit animal.

This post first appeared as my "A wry look at the week" column, in The Mail, on Friday the 21st of March 2019. The version used on the paper's website retained my title (which I was pretty pleased with, seeing as the BBC had already used "squeaky clean").

Lovely story, and made all the better by Steve & Rodney's glorious Bristol accents in this clip on the BBC News website. 

(Tape time: No. 121 - a bunch of stuff from Radio One from 21/04/85.)