There I was minding my own business, pretending to write but really reading Bilgewater by Jane Gardam and listening to songs with ‘Grace’ in the title – Grace is the name of Bilgewater’s friend and nemesis – when the phone rang.
It was Marian from down the road. A moustrap had gone off in her kitchen, but rather than swiftly dispatching the mouse to rodent heaven or hell, it had merely trapped its tail. The children had been hysterical before school: “Mummy you love animals, you can’t kill it!”. It had played dead for a while but was now wriggling vigorously. Although she knew I was busy getting mince out of the freezer, could I assist?
Pausing only to retrieve the mince I’d utterly forgotten about (how did she know?), I slid down the unsalted, icy pavements to number 7. The mouse had buried itself in the very corner of the room. Marian offered me a chisel. Clearly I was expected to woodwork it to death.
Call me a wuss (thank you) but I put my hand in a plastic bag and flipped the mousetrap and mouse in the bag and tied a knot in it. The bag was wriggling. So after some humming and hawing – kill it? chuck it in the bin as it was? I took it outside. Marian provided me with a bag of cement which I dropped on the bag. Cement went everywhere but the mouse wriggled no more.
So I murdered Marian’s mouse. But I think she’s an accessory at the very least.
And I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again – we do not need to watch Outnumbered.