Skip to main content

I’m in with the house proud mouse crowd

Image
By

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.)

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Making an exhibition of yourself

By
Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Schaf Shuffle

By
The weather – source of endless fascination, conversation, irritation and (just recently) excess irrigation. And a fidgety weather presenter on the BBC... I’m endlessly fascinated with the weather, and will confess to making sure I catch the BBC’s updates whenever possible. Not the local ones, where half the presenters look like they got dressed in the dark, or ITV, where they seem to know very little about actual weather, but the national forecasts. Delivered by actual Met Office personnel, their job entails a tricky mix of waving your hands about a bit, explaining about warm fronts without smirking, and trying not to look too pleased whilst mentioning gales force winds and torrential rain. Or stand in front of Cornwall. Each has their own presenting style, but there is one who intrigues me above all the others. Step forward, Tomasz Schafernaker, the 37 year old man from the Met who breezed onto our screens in 2001, as the youngest male ever to point out that it was going to r...
Post a Comment
Read more

RIP Jenwis Hamilbutton

By
We are gathered here in this... (looks round a bit) um... blog, to mourn the passing of Jenwis Hamilbutton. His life may have been short and largely irrelevant, but he touched the lives of so many people that... sorry? Oh. Apparently that was someone else... Jenwis Hamilbutton rose briefly to fame on twitter during 2010, when he was retweeted by BBC F1 presenter Jake Humphrey, having criticised his shirt. A similarly unspectacular claim to fame occurred when a tweet he crafted at 1am on a windy night appeared in F1 Racing magazine. An amalgam of bits of Formula 1 drivers Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button (mostly the hopeless bits), he came into existence via 3 pints of cider, a Creme Egg and the Electric Light Orchestra’s mournful 1986 farewell album “Balance Of Power”, played loudly over headphones. In his short existence, he was followed on twitter by Paul Hardcastle of “19” fame, and a bunch of slightly odd but jolly nice people, whom he was never entirely sure actually exist...
Post a Comment
Read more