Les rats de ville

~ iamthesunking

Our pubs are officially open from today.

However, Cat Daddy and his boozing buddies have decided that they won’t be heading back to the Cock and Bull* quite yet, and that they will continue their virtual drinking meets for the time being. This is great news for Louis Catorze, who loves the Friday night Zoom sessions with the boys, and even better news for me as I get to listen to their captivating chats and tell you all about them.

*I haven’t made this up. This is the actual name of the pub where they used to meet pre-lockdown. I KNOW.

Anyway, for those who are interested, their most recent meeting of minds consisted of the following topics:

1. Eric Clapton

2. Playing whole albums on Spotify/Deezer/Apple Music/whatever, versus only playing selected tracks

3. Who has the biggest car (Tim, Mike and Simon fought it out between them and couldn’t agree, so the conclusion remains inconclusive)

4. Plastering, and the fact that you can (apparently) now get paint which is the same colour as plasterboard

5. Lawn bowls

6. Sutton Beer Festival 1975, when (apparently) a naked lady climbed to the top of a marquee and a naked man chased after her

7. Pete’s summer house/shed, and whether it should be called a summer house or a shed

8. How much salt everyone adds when they’re cooking

In other news, just when we thought it couldn’t get any worse, CANNIBAL RATS. Oh yes. 2020 has already given us blazing infernos (Australia), raging floods (UK), a plague of locusts (Somalia) and a killer virus (erm, everywhere) but, if you drew “cannibal rats” in your workplace sweepstake as the next thing to go wrong in the world, you may well be in the money. On the positive side, the reopening of pubs may draw the little critters away from residential areas. But that’s about the only good news that there is.

Be warned, this link is a darkly comedic yet horrifying read:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/29/summer-of-the-cannibal-rats-hungry-aggressive-highly-fertile-and-coming-to-our-homes?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Thank goodness for Catorze and his relentless hours of Rodent Duty. Ok, so it’s not great that he brings them into the house, but I guess a dead rat in the house is somewhat preferable to a live one running freely and making little ratty babies. (There were many, many things in the above link that made me shudder, but “highly fertile” was by far the worst.)

Here is the little sod, having adopted an elevated position for a better view and continuing to take his civic duty very seriously indeed. So, good citizens of TW8, we can sleep soundly in our beds this summer.

All along the watchtower.

23 thoughts on “Les rats de ville”

  3. We shall all sleep better knowing that there is such a vigilant warrior on duty.

    The divas are not allowed outside but Colette would be their worst nightmare. She came here at seven months of age and I can only guess what terrors she keeps locked inside but she can be deadly. She can also be sweet so what can I say. She runs things around here, tiny as she is (but mighty) and Simone who simply watches and I try to behave…

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    1. Colette and Simone are excellent French cat names! I’m imagining Colette to have the same persona as the lady in Simone de Beauvoir’s Monologue, slightly unhinged and just meowing out one massive rant. 🤣

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      1. Mais oui! That was the human’s devious plan. As soon as they arrived, three months apart, they were put to work writing, they needed writer’s names and they are French. This human is merely the typist. They tried having their own blog but we couldn’t get enough photos. They were having such a good time with the Fabulous Cats from History series but they don’t like being on the other side of the camera anymore than their human… C’est la vie. 🤣

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  4. The New Yorker magazine had an oh-so-true cartoon of rats having a block-party while humans watched from their apartment windows: rats barbequing, rats dancing, sitting at picnic tables, dancing to a live band, rat-kids playing.
    Yes, I had rats in the garden when I had bird feeders, and kept the feeders because it was a citizen science project for a university ornithology department. The neighborhood cats sometimes watched the feeder, but never caught a rat.

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  6. I think it was in a video I saw (but it may have been an article I read) that claimed the human race would have been overrun by rats (to the point that we’d have no grain left to eat) centuries ago if it weren’t for cats. The Great Plague also would have gone a lot better for Europe if they hadn’t kept insisting on killing all those heathen felines. We need to show cats a lot more appreciation (personally, I think the ancient Egyptians had the right idea) 🙂

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      1. He’s providing a public service 🙂 Our local humane society has a program where cats that are okay with people but not friendly enough to be pets are adopted by breweries and warehouses and the like. In exchange for shelter, food, and medical care, they keep the rat population under control. I thought that was a brilliant idea.

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        1. Would you believe, a few years ago Oscar the dog’s mamma mentioned that she’d seen a large brown rat outside, and Catorze caught it that same week! (Cat Daddy thinks it might even have been the next day.) Sadly he brought it up to our bedroom, but he meant well.

          And yes, that is a great idea for semi-ferals!

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