Beachcombing and the Telepathic Rat March 8, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Actualite , trackback
In the last few weeks rats have been seen in the garden of Chez Beachcombing. The women in the house got rather hysterical about these old grandfathers of the sewer running up and down among the roses, and they may have had a point. But the rats don’t live in our garden, they just visit and so there was not that much to do. Beach mixed cinder into the compost heap and made sure that there was nothing edible outside. However, encountering a rat or even getting a sniff of their presence remains a primal experience and not surprisingly Beach dreamt about them last night. One was black and white like a cat and kept running around from under a settee in the kitchen: it was an uncomfortable few hours. In the morning Beach shaved, pottered down the stairs talked to our Hungarian-Scandinavian aupair and, then, a live-in friend (it is a big house), then got ready to work. However, as he was tapping through an essay on highly-skilled migrants and the EU’s blue card system (dream on) Mrs B came in ashen faced: yes, you all know where this is going… there was excrement in the kitchen sink.
Beach had an encounter with rats some years ago when one decided to give birth to her children in a clump of particularly important love letters in an attic space: seeing precious words, precious handwriting, precious memories blend with the afterbirth of a rodent is not a pleasant experience. The point is he is quite knowledgeable in rat matters and confirmed immediately that the black smudge came from a rat not a mouse. Some more had been found on top of the enormous sofa where the black and white rat had hidden in Beach’s dreams. The children were thankfully at school, the three women in the house began to shake their heads with disgust, but Beach alone realized that it was still there: dreams don’t lie do they? He trotted out into the garden and came back with the handle off a shovel (that was broken burying Baby Mrs B’s placenta, another story…) and pulled the sofa back. It was not black and white but in size terms it was a smallish adult cat. At this point, Mrs B.s friend went into partial hysteria. The Hungarian aupair who is a tough cookie went to boil some water (wth!!!!): as she said ‘we’ve got to make it weak’. Mrs B had an appointment with a local tax office and so ran sensibly for the car with baby. And Beach? He screamed, swore and banged his stick up and down as the rat disappeared under the settee. Aggression is an outstandingly good way to push fear down: anger must have saved many lives in history and, it is a matter of record, that it has also made people do very stupid things. The rat was asked how he ***** dare come in this house with the Beach children, did he really think that he was going to walk away from this, Beach would **** his *** spine… In short, a bespectacled bald professor was confused into thinking that he was in an early Tarantino film.
By the time aupair had arrived with a steaming pan common sense had returned. Beach couldn’t go through with it. He opened the door to the garden, blocked all other entrances and then moved the sofa. The sloping, evil thing didn’t dart, it shuffled towards the garden. It was disgusting and tonight a special ‘green poison’ (!!) is going to be put down in the surroundings out of reach of cats, dogs and tortoises. Beach doesn’t believe in telepathy really, but he has been fascinated with the idea that animals and humans communicate in sleep: animals and humans dozing in the same room seem perhaps to understand each other better. However, why would a rat three floors below send a message that he had taken up residence? No it doesn’t make sense, even if the dream was uncannily close. Perhaps Beach had unconsciously heard something between snores? The main memory apart from the sloping back and long tail as it left the house will be the nice Hungarian girl shouting for boiling water: forget Tarantino, for about forty seconds then we were all back in the middle ages and about to go pogrom.
Tomorrow a return to the important business of history but I needed to get this off my chest.
