A Rat Stole MY Potato Peeler

I don’t know if either of my readers look at “What’s New” in the sidebar, but if you did, you will know we recently had a toilet emergency and, as I noted in What’s New, you do not realise how often you use the toilet until it is no longer available.

This unfolded on a Saturday afternoon. A flush: no problem. Next flush: a flood.

Being the pro-active guy that I am, I removed the bodge-job construction covering the plumbing and discovered the source, which was a large hole in the flexible pipe connecting the toilet to the exit pipe (I think that’s the technical term). I then flushed the toilet just so I could film the water gushing from the hole because I have learned from past experience that the landlord’s agents will not even consider addressing an issue without concrete evidence.

I also know, from bitter experience, that the landlord’s agents don’t want to hear about any issues—supported by evidence or not—on a weekend. This was confirmed when I tried to call them and got a recording telling me they were not home. They did provide an Out of Hours number, so I called that, left a message, and proceeded to fix the toilet myself.

A bit of duct tape and plastic film later, and the toilet was usable (and just about in time) though each flush did require a bit of mopping up. Then, incredibly, I got a call back. The person accepted my evidence but then told me they were the agents for the building, not the flats, and wondered why I had called them.

“Leave it with me,” the woman said, and we resigned ourselves to popping to the nearest pub anytime we needed the loo.

Then, incredibly, a plumber arrived at 11:00am on Sunday and fixed the toilet. He also offered to reassemble the bodge-job covering the plumbing. I told him I wanted to leave it overnight to dry out, and that I’d do it myself, and we settled in for a second night with the plumbing exposed.

I told you all of that so I could tell you this:

On Sunday morning, our potato peeler went missing.

My wife had recently used it, I had washed it (yes, I do the dishes; eat your hearts out, ladies) and put it away, but when she went to find it again, it was gone.

It’s a small flat, so there are a limited number of places it could be, and it wasn’t in any of them. The only thing we could think was it must have disappeared through the rend in the space-time continuum where all the odd socks go.

Then, on Monday morning, I noticed that we’d had an earth tremor during the night. I didn’t find this strange as it would not have been the first time I slept through an earthquake.* Spices had been jostled from the spice rack, the precarious pile of kitchen necessities had tumbled from the top of the bread bin, and the cutting boards had fallen over. I did find it strange that the tremor had only hit the kitchen, as no other precarious piles had suffered, and it was not mentioned on the news. Then I discovered the rubbish bins had been gnawed (something earth tremors are not known to do).

Proof that this was a rat, and not a mouse or a squirrel, was confirmed because he had left a calling card on the rug, which ruled out mice. Squirrel was ruled out because rats are shy and quiet whereas a squirrel would have caused more of a racket and I would have found him brazenly sitting at the table demanding breakfast when I got up.

That’s when I realized where the potato peeler went: the rat took it.

The coincidences were just too great to ignore: we had never lost a potato peeler before, we had never had a rat problem before, and we had never removed the bodge-job covering the plumbing before. Additionally, I had used the name Templeton in my previous post and, although I took it from a character in a book I’m reading, it is also the name of the rat in the animated version of Charlotte’s Web. It all had to be related.

Except: bodge-job aside, the rat superhighway runs from the dining area, through the kitchen cupboards and into the bathroom, and has exit ramps at regular intervals. Any rodent worthy of the name could, at any given time, squeeze through any of the gaps. And what would a rat want with a potato peeler, except to decorate his den with? A bit of Avante-Garde sculpture, perhaps. And finally, rats are not likely to have read Charlotte’s Web.

However, coincidence or not, Templeton had arrived, and as my wife is deathly afraid of rats, she assured me that I was definitely and swiftly going to do something about it. So, I refit the bodge-job and bought some rat bait.

I recall, from my younger days, putting boxes of d-Con down willy-nilly, but these days you are required to employ bait stations (££) and lock secure packets (££) inside them. I understand it’s to keep your children from eating them, but we don’t have any, and I was certain the bait box was not going to entice Templeton, and he proved that by ignoring it the first night.

So, the second night, I just put a packet on the floor. Next morning it was gone. I hope he ate it and didn’t just take it to his burrow to hang it next to his potato peeler sculpture.

* On our first trip to Albany, we were awakened in our motel room by a rumble and shaking. Well, my wife was awakened. She woke me up. I rolled over, listened for a second, felt the earth vibrating and said, “It’s just a heavy truck going by. Go back to sleep.” The next morning we learned there had been a sizable earthquake centred around Lake Placid.