it's enough to make you sick...

The Pilgrim Penguin has caught a virus and has spent today on the couch at home and will need to take at least another day off work. This is a bit of a downer. However, to brighten the day a little, she is going to share something from her reading. Be warned however, that you should not read this post while eating...

Alice Thomas Ellis quotes from a letter written to her:

"You throw doubt, tinged with scorn, on the efficacy of mice as a specific for children. In 1920 when I was four years old an old woman who lived near my family in Radlett and whom I used to visit on every occasion I could find, would give me sugar mice to eat.

These were made by skinning mice, which she had caught in an ordinary mousetrap, emptying them and then tying them by the tail to a wooden spoon where they were suspended into a strong sugar syrup in a cast iron saucepan over a slow heat. After some hours (or days) the mice became crystallised and, when they were cold, she would give me one to eat.

They were delicious and even the bones were crisp and edible (not unlike the bones in a mature tin of sardines). I remember her saying that I would never have chest trouble if I ate these 'sweetmeats'. I am now over seventy and have had little to complain about health-wise as one says these days, in the years between these delightful treats and now." (page 31 Fish, Flesh and Good Red Herring)

To think we wasted all our mice by poisoning them!!

pilgrim penguin 2 : mice 1

For the blog entry which gives background to this post, click here.

I am claiming victory in the battle to evict the mice population from our home. I have used a combination of thick silver tape and steel wool to plug the gaps in our under sink cupboard. I have also thoroughly disinfected the cupboard and put some tape over a mouse sized gap in the floorboards near the pantry.

It's not aesthetically pleasing, but I feel a sense of satisfaction and cleanliness every time I open the cupboard to put something in the bin.

: )

mousy mousy

We are dealing with an unpleasant infestation. It all began a few weeks ago when we heard a rustling in our rubbish bin as we ate our breakfast cereal. A mouse had managed to push out the steel wool I'd used to stuff the holes in the back of the cupboard where the bin resides, and had fallen into the bin.

I felt sorry for it on a number of counts:


Firstly the mouse couldn't get out of the bin and had been unsuccessfully trying to climb out, potentially for an entire night.

Further, it hadn't benefited from its efforts in the slightest. The bin had nothing in it save one empty packet of chocolate teddy bear biscuits.

Finally, mousy met a sticky end at the hands of my husband. We have a "don't ask, don't tell" policy concerning the destruction of pests around the house so I know none of the details. I can only presume that it was swift and painless.


We are now seeking to kill the mouse population with "talon" poison. We've stuck a little cube of it in the cupboard with the bin, and one in a hard to reach (humanly speaking) corner of the pantry. Thankfully the one in the pantry hasn't been touched. However the one near the bin has been nibbled and moved around a lot. The poison can take up to two weeks to knock them off, so we'll need to be a bit patient.

We will also need to find ways to reassure visitors who hear strange banging noises coming from our kitchen cupboards. Last night at a Bible study we were hosting, a soon to be dead mouse decided that it was going to noisily play with the cube of talon during a moment of quiet discussion about the application of a potentially sensitive passage from the Bible (Col 3:18-4:1). We had split the group down gender lines for this time and I think that the lack of male voices in the room meant that mousy felt emboldened to have a play.

After 10-15 minutes of hoping it would settle down, I fessed up to the girls about the noise. Thankfully no one was too grossed out and one of them reassuringly told a story about mice that can scale the outer wall of ten story apartment blocks in the country that she originally comes from. It puts a few little ones in the under sink cupboard into perspective.