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

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

By
If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...
Post a Comment
Read more

Suffering from natural obsolescence

By
You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...
Post a Comment
Read more