Rats

It’s about this time of year that you start to see them. Once the corn has been cut, you catch sight of them feasting among the golden stubble in the early mornings, or dodging the traffic to gobble up any grain that has been spilled on the road. They don’t all survive the road: I have seen about half a dozen squashed rats today. Drivers don’t tend to avoid rats like they do other creatures.

There is something in the human psyche that recoils at the mention of rats. “They’re just sleeker, less cuddly rabbits with a PR problem,” I said to my mum tonight. “No they’re not,” she said, and shuddered, “they’re dirty and disease-ridden.” That’s just the point: I’m sure our collective revulsion is a racial memory dating back to the plague. But rattus rattus, the black rat that was infested with Black Death-carrying fleas, was expelled from Britain long ago. Our rats today are his cousin, the brown rat.

I have not inherited the rodent-terror that runs down the female line in my family, but mention rats to many otherwise sane people, and they feel fingers of repulsion creeping up their spine. Rats still have the power to strike fear into people’s hearts. We thought we had the rat story of the year when I was a trainee journalist. One of my fellow trainees spotted a couple of rats one morning; research revealed they’d been lurking in the area where the city’s cholera dead had been buried decades before. How long could cholera survive in the soil, we wondered? We communicated with the director of communicable diseases at the hospital; (un)fortunately, he told us that the disease did not lie dormant.

Apparently there is a new breed of ‘super’ rat that is resistant to warfarin. These fortnightly bin collections are probably keeping him in a manner he’s become accustomed to. His country cousins, gorging on the grain, don’t know what they’re missing …

Boris the spider

The spring spider season has started in my house. Their favoured hang-out is my bath. I have recently removed two to prevent them from drowning. One was able to escape onto the windowsill; the other made a run for it across the floor, but alas, the cats did to it what cats do to small defenceless creatures.

The fact I can remove spiders is a big breakthrough; it wasn’t always the case. Now, I can put a glass over them, slide a leaflet that’s fallen out of a magazine (see, they do have a purpose) under them, and set them free. I am able to mock those afflicted with arachnophobia.

I was once a sufferer myself. As a child, I was petrified of spiders, although curiously, I was a big fan of Itsy and Bitsy on TV. Over the years, I was able to convince myself that it was natural and right to fear spiders – it was a ‘primitive memory’ of when the creepy little fellas could really do you harm. When I moved to Cambridgeshire in the hot summer of 1995, the spiders were immense. They had, as my news editor at the time said, knees and ankles.

Gradually, though, I acclimatised myself to spiders outside. My theory was that I had plenty of space to run away from them. In the last few years, I have reached the stage where I have desensitised myself to them inside too.

However, I curse people who put big pictures of spiders in newspapers and magazines to make me jump when I turn the page, and I still occasionally awake with a start in the early hours convinced there is a spider on my pillow. I can’t do foreign, furry spiders either, but I reckon I have the domestic fellas sussed …