Swept away...or not

Can it really be almost three months since I wrote about my ghastly experiences with pizza and dead squirrels?   Well, reader, I have more to share.


Having insisted that the Shah wake me this morning before his departure to the Midlands, I was up and about damn early for one who has a week off.  Catching up on blogs I never get time to read, I heard what I naively imagined to be the ASBO cats enjoying a merry romp in the next room.  The romp did seem to be a little on the hysterical side, admittedly, but hey - it was early and I had better things to think about.  However, after about 5 minutes, I became aware of odd sort of clucking sounds and far more scrabbling than I would have expected... oh crap - another bloody pigeon, I thought.  So I bravely stuck my head around the door.  both cats were staking out the table that the TV sits on.  Whatever they had brought in had obviously managed to hide underneath it and was making the mother of all noises.  I tiptoed past and up the stairs to wake TS - mightily unimpressed as you can imagine.  "Please - I need you," I begged and he unwillingly loped downstairs looking like something freshly disinterred.  


This time we were organised.  I opened the back doors as wide as they would go.  He stood on a kitchen chair with the broom, the better to brush whatever it was out towards the door.  I stood on an armchair with an ancient window pole and prepared to use the hooky end to move the table.  Lo and behold!  Another feckin' squirrel - only this time very much alive and very panicked.  Did it work?  Did it run to the back door?  Did it hell.  No!  It gambolled merrily to the front door and jumped up and down in a crazy manner as if to cry - "let me out, you heartless bastards."  Then, sensing the futility of this action, it ran back to its hiding place under the telly while TS and I squealed like babies and waved brooms and poles around feebly.


By this stage, the cats had both decided they were now scared of Sciurus Minimus and they were the ones who departed sharpish out of the back door with our curses ringing in their ears.  TS then bravely climbed down from his perch and unlocked the front door and we went through the whole horrible process one more time, except that, this time, Sciurus saw sense and bolted with, of course, both cats in hot pursuit.

As I said to the Shah on the phone later, they were like two blokes boasting down the pub about the one that got away.."of course, I coulda had 'im, right?  "Yeah mate, me too...we were THAT close - no worries."  


And the moral of the story, dear cats, is - DON'T START WHAT YOU CAN'T FINISH!

Squirreled away ...

Because I am a good and careful mother and I make sure I feed my children (and their friends) a balanced, nutritious diet, I ordered in Pizza a couple of nights ago. Well, I have my excuses. I was due to go out with a couple of girlfriends who are known to my kids as ‘the usual suspects’ because they are the people I see most of for GNOs (Girls’ Nights Out in case you hadn’t managed to figure that one out).

We had decided to go and see A Single Man, the film for which Colin Firth was Oscar-nominated, on the grounds that the chances of any of our husbands taking us to see a film with gay men in it were - well - what can I say but oink, oink, flap, flap... I had arranged all this, cheerfully forgetting that TD wanted to come home with a friend, tart themselves up, grab a bite to eat and then be transported back to school to watch their mates in a Gymnastic display. I had also forgotten that the Shah had headed off to the Midlands somewhere on a business trip (for which read ‘Getting Smashed in the Hotel Bar’ Trip). Not that the culinary welfare of my children would have been much different if the Shah had been in residence – it would have been Pizza out of the freezer as opposed to Pizza out of the Delivery Man’s scooter box. But I digress.

So....the pizza man rings the doorbell, the girls are upstairs and I hear TS coming in through the back door from his hockey practice. As I open the front door Paddy, the ASBO cat, has obviously come up behind me and shoots past and out into the front garden. Nothing unusual in that – Paddy is obsessed with the front door, spending many happy hours staring at it, willing it to open.  I pay the nice man, take the boxes and shut the door again.  I turn and yell out to the girls (by now half way down the stairs)and TS that Pizza’s up. Then I take one step forward in the direction of the kitchen and land fatefully on something soft and yielding. Of course I jumped a mile, thinking that I had stepped on the other cat’s tail or something, but he hadn’t yowled so that didn’t quite ring true. Holding the pizza boxes flat in front of me meant that I couldn’t actually see my feet, so I lifted the boxes up to look at what I had stepped on.

There, supine on the hall rug, lay a very large, very mauled and very dead squirrel.

(Cue voice over from Keifer Sutherland...) What follows takes place between 6pm and 6.22pm last Tuesday evening...

Actually, what follows is a bit of a blur. I do believe I shrieked “FUUUUUUUUCK” at the top of my lungs and ran into the sitting room. The girls screamed in unison and shot back up the stairs. Big beardy TS also bawled something beginning with ‘F’ and ran through the house, driven by a morbid fascination, to have a look at the corpse. I also have a vague memory of yelling “where’s your (expletive deleted) father when I need him?” as it dawned on me that TS’s rodent phobia (see previous posting entitled A Tale of Two Kitties...) meant that he was going to be feck-all use in clearing away the carcass.  I was so utterly repulsed by the sight of this giant rat-with-a-furry-tail spread-eagled on my favourite rug that I could hardly bring myself to go near it, and I’m not the squeamish type (well not really).   Then, of course, I managed to convince myself that it wasn’t dead, merely unconscious which actually made me want to retch as I got close to it.

Eventually, I had to grab the coal tongs and two carrier bags, one inside the other for safety, and then gingerly, and at arm’s length, pick it up and bag it, tying the ends in a double knot. Meanwhile, the girls had kept up a stream of squeals and “like ewwww, grrrrooossssss, Mum” from halfway up the stairs where they remained, gazing horrified through the banisters until the coast was clear.

So, being the kind of good and careful mother I really am, I then spent a happy ten minutes chasing TS round the house with dead squirrel in a bag to get him back for leaving me with the cadaver.

As I left for my GNO, his voice drifted after me down the garden path...”You are a bad, bad person!”

He loves me really. Honest.