Trashed elbow

But what actually will happen when he presents this evidence to the world?  Firstly he will come up against the jealousy and infighting which goes on endlessly amongst all researchers in both the conventional sciences and the para-sciences; his method will be questioned and his honesty brought into doubt.  Even if he is part of a ten-man time, all of whom are in total agreement about the evidence, this is how it will be.  In fact in all likelihood the first bickering will take place amongst those ten.

From The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits
by John and Anne Spencer

Labels: NATURE, PSYCHE, WORDS

A mouse lived in a windmill in old Amsterdam
A windmill with a mouse in and he wasn't grousin'
He sang every morning, "How lucky I am,
Living in a windmill in old Amsterdam!"

I saw a mouse! (Where?)
There on the stair!
(Where on the stair?)
Right there!
A little mouse with clogs on
(Well I declare!)
Going clip-clippety-clop on the stair

***

I was on duty Friday and Monday, the caretaking gig. The building is a former halls of residence. I also happen to live there. When the usual guy's away, I merely have to be out of bed by nine o'clock, let anyone relevant in and make sure the place doesn't get worked over. My previous stint on the clock included asbestos removal, giant rodents and a police manhunt. There are many ways to make a living, this is one.

Things promised to be much quieter this time round, although Dave (the usual guy) told me he'd been having some mouse problems in his kitchen. With little else to do (other than watch Wimbledon being rained off on the telly) I resolved to see if I couldn't lighten his load a little by catching one or two of the blighters.

To this end, I erected a comedy 'propped up box' trap in the kitchen, with a succession of shoelaces tied together to pull the prop out as I couldn't find a long enough piece of string. I settled down and played the waiting game. Occasionally, I'd hear promising scuffling noises, which I took to come from the kitchen skirting board, a renowned hotspot of mouse activity, but nothing emerged. After about 45 minutes of false alarms, I decided the mouse (or mice) was just messing me about. I was also getting peckish and quite fancied eating the piece of toast that I'd been using as bait.

Turning around (chewing on my piece of floor toast), what should I see in the corridor but a mouse, gaily running in circles? Well I declare, I thought, he was out there all the while. I swiftly threw a towel over him and grabbed a box to stuff him into. I picked up the balled-up towel and shook it out into the box.

No dice. Or, rather, no mice.

The only place he could have gone from under the towel was under the door of the communal room and I found this tough to believe as the gap under the door didn't look as if it would have given an ant easy passage. However, I opened the door just in time to see the mouse vanish under the sofa. I pulled out the sofa and he ran under the armchair. I pulled this out and he squeezed back out under the door, which I'd had the partial foresight to close.

I dashed back into the kitchen and watched as the mouse vanished under the refrigerator. This time, I was determined there would be no errors. I cleared away all the furniture around the fridge for ease of movement and armed myself with a mop, with which to obstruct the errant mouse's escape or, as a last resort, to bash his head in.

Just as I was about to pull the fridge out from the wall, something caught my eye: it was a mouse in the garden, scurrying away from the glass kitchen door, having apparently got out from behind the fridge via some unknown crack in the wall. Son of a gun, I thought. It was a bit like the dream I had where I was holding Paul Daniels prisoner and he ended up making a complete arse of me.

I pulled out the fridge to have a look at the crack in the wall. There wasn't one but the mouse, sensing his opportunity, bolted out from behind the fridge and made the safety of the gap in the skitchen skirting board while it was still dawning on me that the mouse in the garden had, in fact, been a different mouse.

At this point, I threw in the towel. The mouse had made me look like a complete oaf and it was nearly five o'clock. I spent the weekend away, camping in the Lake District and getting drunk, leaving the cocky rodent free to enjoy the run of the halls.

Then, on Monday, the mouse got over confident: he decided to run right past me in the corridor while I was just standing there composing a text message. Either that or he thought I was such an easy mark he could tie my shoelaces together or some other such cartoonish rodent villainy. Having despaired of the 'kid gloves' approach, I unceremoniously kicked him against the wall. The mouse tried to get away, so I gave him another boot. He rolled on his back and made piteous squeaks of protest but I was implacable: I grabbed a plastic packing crate that was lying in the corridor and forced him into it. Having achieved all this, I relented a little and gave him some peanut butter on toast and a couple of bogroll tubes to keep him entertained while I saw out the clock on the rest of the working day.

Despite my best efforts to make Irvine* feel at home, he wasn't at all happy. He kept trying to jump out of his plastic prison, with about as much success as I might expect if I tried to leap out of Warwick Castle from the courtyard.

I couldn't help but feel a bit depressed that this feeble-minded rodent had been outwitting me with such ease on Friday. I was evidently having a bad day.

Come five o'clock I was off duty so I punched a couple of holes in the lid of a jar and went to scoop up my mouse. He fled inside one of the toilet roll holders. Conveniently enough, this fit perfectly into the mouth of the jar, so I stuck it in and did my best cocktail shake until the mouse was dislodged and fell in. I then screwed the lid on and rode off to Wormwood Scrubs with jar, mouse and all.

I released Irvine by the stables, into which he scurried without a backwards glance, leaving me feeling strangely bereft. All that effort on one mouse. Not that he appreciated it, the ungrateful vermin.

***

A note on the name I chose for my temporary pet:

A few years ago, around the time the first Hulk film came out, I saw a programme about how the character had been treated in the comics and on the TV show. Stan Lee, the character's creator, was very critical of the TV show changing the name of the Hulk's alter-ego from Bruce Banner to David Banner.

"That's like calling Mickey Mouse, Irvine Mouse," said Lee, a man with an admirable talent for explaining What The Problem Is.

Or he may have said Irving. I can't remember.

Labels: NATURE, SELF IMPROVEMENT, UNGRATEFUL VERMIN

Last October, I ran the inaugural RunLiverpool Marathon, where I had a bit of a torrid time. I staggered the last six miles, tipping bottled water over my screamingly painful knees, telling myself I'd never, ever be so foolish as to run another marathon. Then, when I'd finished, I instantly decided that I'd actually really enjoyed myself and I'd sign up for another one in the spring.

I chose another first-time race, the Greater Manchester Marathon, figuring that some of my friends from the area might also fancy a crack at it. They told me where to go.

Around mid-March when we were enjoying some particularly clement weather, I began to fret that an end-of-April marathon might be a bit on the warm side. After all, this is what the last weekend of April was like last year:

Alright for bloody Frankel. Alright for me too actually, as I'd picked Dubawi Gold to come second.

However, the end of April this year was wet. Very wet. It had been peeing it down for weeks and weather forecasts were for a month's worth of rain on the Sunday (race day) with pretty robust wind. This meant that, of the projected 8,000 starters, a couple of thousand thought better of it. Not me though. I'm dead tough.

Look at that weather! Makes you glad to be alive

After training like a lunatic for the last couple of months, I was hoping to make it round the course in 3:10, which would make me 'good for my age' according to the criteria of the London Marathon website. I had a bit of a race plan, which involved going easy-ish for eight miles, picking up the speed until halfway, then hanging on until 20 miles, then really, really, really hanging on for the last six-and-a-bit. Of course, as soon as they let us go, I got over-excited and steamed off like a gibbering, wide-eyed mess. Not quite Frankel, but you get the idea.

Spotters badge!

The day was grey and wet, but there was a lot of support and encouragement around the course. At one stage we passed through a country park which had been turned into a bog by the weather conditions, so unlucky to anyone who fancied finishing with clean trainers. Towards the end of the course, we also got sent through a subway, then up some steps, which really isn't what your legs want after 25 miles of continuous pounding.

The country park in good weather

Most of the way, I felt ok. When I started to feel tired, I'd slow down a bit and try to work out Japanese verbs and their opposites in my head, which proved sufficiently distracting. After a heroic last 10k (I improved about 80 places, although I suspect this was more down to other people being in tremendous physical distress than any olympian burst of speed on my part) I waddled over the line in 3:09:49, making me officially good for my age. In fact, as age 33 is the equivalent of a scratch handicap, my time makes me officially just good, albeit by a rather more slender margin than I would have liked.

What wasn't good was the baggage reclaim fiasco that followed. Everyone's identical 'Greater Manchester Marathon' bags were in a disorganised heap in a tent with no means of being sorted or searched. I ended up waiting about ninety minutes in my piss-wet running gear with a piece of tin foil to keep me warm and I think a fair few people ended up needing medical attention. At one point, I found myself stuck in line next to a guy who'd finished more than an hour behind me.

"When I finally get my bag back, I'm probably going to cry," I told him. "Especially if my wallet's been stolen."

Happily, I did eventually locate my bag, thanks largely to the fact that my tracksuit bottoms were sticking conspicuously out of the top. The lack of organisation and co-ordination at the baggage tent though had caused a completely avoidable emergency and, had I read in the following morning's paper that someone had died of hypothemia, exposure, or simply old age waiting to get their bag back, I should not have been surprised.

The Greater Manchester Marathon is currently scoring about 50% approval on the feedback section of the Runners World UK website (to put that in some kind of context, most events have to do quite badly to get less than 80%) and the organisers have issued an apology online for nearly killing everyone.

A couple of other marathons were taking place on the same day: Milton Keynes ended up being a bit longer than planned as the course had to be altered at the last minute to avoid a flooded area, while the Shakespeare Marathon became the Shakespeare Half Marathon at very short notice after some parts of the course were deemed unsafe. Apparently some of the runners didn't realise this had happened and were a bit taken aback to find out at 10 miles in that they were nearly finished.

Since the weekend, I've been walking like a womble with his shoelaces tied together and getting back on the beer after a month's abstinence. I also need a new pair of trainers, if not a new pastime.

Labels: NATURE, SELF IMPROVEMENT

Frank Costello: Fucking rats. It's wearing me thin.

***

I had to be up early the other day to let the asbestos removal people in. We're having asbestos removed from the building at the moment - just one of those things that needs doing, I suppose.

Our building is situated on a little close off a side street and doesn't attract much foot traffic, other than wrong turns. Therefore, I was a bit surprised to see a young couple, a boy and a girl, come running up our close and dive into the hedge at the end. I was even more surprised when a police car pulled into the close, made a quick three-pointer and left.

There's somewhat in't, I thought.

A minute or two later, the asbestos guys arrived, full of the story of a failed mugging they'd just seen out on the high street. According to their story, a young couple had been attempting to waylay 'a big African' (disclaimer: he was probably one of those Africans from Jamaica) who, finding himself unable to escape their attentions, had filled the lad in. The couple had then fled, the lad bleeding rather a lot from his nose apparently.

Having heard all this, I decided I would go and investigate the hedge at the end of the close. Pocketing my phone, I headed to the front door to find two policemen outside.

"Hello there, sir. Is it all flats in here?" asked policeman #1 airily, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for the filth to roll up on your doorstep first thing in the morning and conduct an impromptu housing survey.

"Ye-es," I replied levelly. "But if you happen to be looking for two fugitives, I should tell you they ran down there and jumped into that hedge." (Here, I indicated the direction and foliage accordingly.)

The policemen thanked me and went and investigated the hedge. No sign. They then called in a dog squad and a chopper, made a bunch of noise and then suddenly departed. Either they'd flushed their rabbits out of one of the neighbouring gardens and caught them on the street or, as seems more probable, they'd just decided to go for an early lunch.

Quite a bit of excitement for one day, I thought, putting my feet up in the living room and listening to the sounds of asbestos being ripped none-too-delicately out of the walls. At this point, the biggest, greyest rat I've ever seen scuttled into the room, had a quick look at me, turned around and scuttled back out.

I don't think he was any more pleased to see me than I was to see him.

Labels: IMPENDING DOOM, MOMENTS, NATURE

http://www.vespa-crabro.de/hornets.htm

"These wasps are pretty big," I mused. "And they've got all-yellow faces."

"Like hornets, you mean?" This latter was Dave's voice from downstairs.

"That's pretty much what I was thinking."

While my place is a bit of a dump (each time it rains, for example, I end up with more floor and less ceiling) I think the presence of freakishly large pseudo-wasps in the kitchen may represent a new low.

I flapped at the two invaders with a towel, succeeding only in making them angry. Going to a hastily improvised back-up strategy, I made a smart departure taking care to close the kitchen door behind me.

In the downstairs room, while Dave jumped in the shower, I collected my thoughts and my breath.

Then, bzzzzzzzz.

Once I had my heart rate back to below 270 bpm, I answered my phone, which had been set to vibrate, and told Bailey that he'd just frightened me out of my skin. He laughed. Dave and I headed out to meet him for drinks and, when we returned, there was no sign of the yellow-and-dangerous in the kitchen.

Some research this morning informs me that hornets are more docile than regular wasps. They're also supposed to be woodland creatures, although a glance at my garden explains how they might have got confused.



If the hornets have set up shop in my garden (and, please God, not my roofspace) it may turn out well. They're meant to be quite good for controlling garden pests which in my case includes a burgeoning colony of gutter pigeons and the occasional trespasser.

Labels: NATURE

I told this to Joe a while back, but I think it's as well to share it with anyone else who might be interested.

In the unlikely event of me being mauled to death by a tiger, I don't want any of this Of course, the last thing Dan would have wanted was for any harm to come to the animal rubbish.

If I meet my end at the claws of some feckless stripy thug, I give my seal of approval to any reprisals. If his pelt decorates my coffin, so much the better.

Labels: NATURE

Greebo, the elder of our two cats, was not feeling well. Funnily enough, she seems always to be the one in ill health; our other cat, Stimpy, is as healthy as a horse and could probably survive being steamrollered with no more than a mild headache.

The source of Greebo's discomfort was a swelling in the tear duct of her good eye which, apart from being quite sore, must really have been ruining the remainder of her view.

We stuffed the wretched cat in a picnic hamper and took her off to see the vet.

The vet sucked his teeth and told us there was no choice but to have the cat anaesthetised so he could cut open and drain the swelling. Not ideal for a 17-year-old cat.

I was rather hoping she could go under the knife there and then, but he wanted to get home for his tea and anaesthetic also requires the cat to have an empty stomach.

He sent us away, enjoining us to return the next morning with an unfed cat. I then had to spend ages in the waiting room while he printed off the required consent forms.

"I don't know what's taking him so long," said the receptionist with a nervous smile.

"He's probably googling the cat's symptoms," I suggested uncharitably, in the sure knowledge that nobody was going to be putting a knife anywhere near my face.

***


We returned the next morning to drop Greebo off.

"Has she been starved overnight?" asked the receptionist. I gave her a look.

"Why, yes," I said. "And we've mistreated her this morning."


***


Happily, the vet didn't take out any of my glib comments on the cat and she was none the worse for her operation. The lump has been removed from her tear duct and she now has a cool pink scar next to her eye that makes her look like she's been roughhousing with some other cat.

More importantly, she's much happier and once again has perfect ten-ten vision.

Labels: NATURE, WORDS

So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen.
Matthew 20:16

***


This year's chilli-growing is not going well.

The first promising hopefuls to graduate from seed to seedling were murdered by the wanton negligence of my mother, who didn't feel like watering them in my absence.

One of the plants did survive this torrent of cruelty so I gave it to a friend as a birthday present, enjoining her to take good care of it.

The second batch were getting by quite comfortably in the garden at Gray's Inn Rd, until one morning I found they'd been ravaged by a snail, which I found sleeping off his banquet next to the mauled plants.

Presuming the snail had never tasted chilli leaves before, it was my privilege to introduce him to another couple of new experiences:

1. Flight at 50mph
2. Death

So I'm now down to my last throw of the dice: I've put the late developing seedlings out in the garden, hoping they will survive the caprices of the weather and the machinations of snail.

Labels: NATURE

More information on the Norwegian Elkhound

Labels: NATURE, U-TUBE

It turns out that Australia has a huge feral camel population, possibly numbering up to a million.

According to the article I read in yesterday's Grauniad, the camels were imported and used to explore less hospitable parts of the country.

After they had served their turn, they were turned loose in the desert, their callous handlers figuring they'd die.

In the desert.

I find myself wondering if the Aussies imported sharks as pets, realised they weren't any good and hit upon the solution of drowning them.

Labels: DULLARDS, NATURE, NEWS

Sitting on the train at London Bridge, about to depart into the Saturday night for destinations which have only previously occupied my consciousness as Carter USM lyrics and the space on my mental map marked 'here be dragons'.

One of London's feral pigeons flutters through the still-open train door and waddles regally under a seat, opposite which a girl is reading.

Unwilling to share a carriage for three stops with noxious guano-spilling vermin, I grab my notepad (practising shorthand) and head over.

"Excuse me," I say in passing to the girl, who ignores me entirely.

I crouch down and flap my notepad under the seat.

"Go on, fuck off out of it you fucker. Jesus fucking Christ..."

The pigeon, discomfited by my flailing (or unimpressed with my language) leaves huffily.

"Sorry about that," I say to the girl, standing up. Her ignorance of me redoubles.

I return to my seat and my reflections. London is a foreign country.

Labels: MOMENTS, NATURE, TRAVEL

Skimming along at 80mph, the sun shining through the windshield, I almost miss the sign.

At the last minute I spot it: Welcome to Wales. I whoop and punch the air. I'm on my way.


Ten minutes later, it's raining and I'm stuck behind a tractor.

Labels: NATURE

Wednesday night is football night - a long drive out to Shirley, followed by an hour or more of running around a big astroturf pitch, making the opposition look good.

I was warming up with Paul at the top end of the pitch. I hit a low pass which missed him, but did connect with a squirrel, who'd been keeping a low profile next to the fence. The squirrel ran around in fretful circles; we had a bit of a snigger.

Unwilling to see Nutkin-san meet with further accident, I tried to shepherd him over the fence. The trouble was, he wouldn't go. I had images of him being squashed by a well-hit shot. In the end, we had to walk in formation the length of the pitch with the increasingly jittery squirrel fleeing before us to the gate, while red squirrels around the world threw beer cans at their TV sets and shouted "kill the bastard!" and similar.

Nutkin-san made it out of the gate without mishap. Possibly due to the good karma I reaped from this, I got a couple of goals and broke a streak of several weeks without being on the winning team.

Labels: NATURE, THE BEAUTIFUL GAME

I emerge into the garden to find the tomato plant lying forlornly on its side, its precious soil spilt across the patio. My rage temporarily outweighs my reason:

"That does it- those aphids have gone too far this time!"

Labels: NATURE

In the wee small hours of the morning, I was at my computer. An ominous noise behind me made me turn. Stimpy, tongue stuck halfway out of her head, was retching. Before I could get her off the sofa onto the nice wipe-clean wooden floor, she threw up.

Damn, I thought, surveying the damage done to the sofa. I should have been quicker.

Stimpy started retching again. I grabbed hold of her and tried to sweep her off the sofa, but for some reason she dug her claws in and, at the last second, lunged forward and managed to send her second load of vomit into the mum's handbag. I didn't really know if this was better or worse.

Labels: MOMENTS, NATURE

Sunlight glaring through the windscreen, the mum rattling on about the traumas of an acquaintance's life in the passenger seat. A lone pigeon on the opposite side of the road stands dejectedly in front of an oncoming vehicle, too jaded to care.

The oncoming car does not simply kill the pigeon: it destroys it. Something like a flurry of snow scatters over the road. Feathers everywhere. Who would have thought the old bird had so many feathers?

I have seen birth, I think, as I swing the car left and head up Spencer Avenue, past number 57, the house where I saw birth; and now I have seen death.

The mother, unaware that a life has winked out of existence within the last few seconds, is still on about what's-her-name.

"Sorry, Mum- you may need to rewind a bit. I was with you up to the point where you said her feller was shoeing her around, then I got distracted by the sunlight."

Labels: MOMENTS, NATURE

I have been enjoying "Big cat live" week on the BBC, rife with malapropisms and onanistic, self-congratulatory non-celebs as it is.

The Beeb's online content is inaccessible from outside these isles, sadly, so little point in embedding footage in this page. With the live webcams offering little other than up-to-the-minute coverage of Lions sitting on their lazy backsides and Hyena and Jackal cubs, highlights of cats were almost exclusively archive footage, of which the show has compiled a fairly impressive array during the more than ten years since its first showing:

Leopard brings down wildebeest in the midst of a stampeding herd. Having choked the life out of her victim with a throat hold, looks momentarily torn, then dashes back into the middle of the stampede and jumps on ANOTHER wildebeest, to the audible delight and disbelief of the presenter.

Highlights of bad English included one of the commentators repeatedly attempting to use "galvanise" as an intransitive verb, before forgetting what he was trying to say midway through a sentence, eventually concluding that certain cheetah cubs, which were being discussed, weren't young enough yet to be named.

In truth, I remember that the original "Big cat diary" was considerably better in theory than in practice. The programme improved over the years, but I found it much more agreeable in the weekly format than in the current daily format: in classic BBC sports-commentator fashion, the presenters insult the intelligence of their audience with continuous repetition of fairly easy-to-grasp stuff, which I find easier to stomach once a week than every evening.

Of our own wildlife situation, Joe observes that we have birds nesting just outside our kitchen door. My thoughts turn immediately to the danger posed to these by our pair of cats.

Joe's thoughts are evidently not too far removed from my own:

"I daresay I'll be scraping them off the kitchen floor at some point."

He shrugs, then goes to brew some more coffee.

Labels: NATURE, WORDS

William is a French teacher at my school. He speaks pretty good English, although not without a touch of the gallic:

"Wuaaah! Look at zat!"

I wander over to have a look. A gigantic cockroach is in the middle of the floor in plain view. Perhaps unaware that it has been discovered, it doesn't make the trademark lightning dash for safety. I take William's lunch bag (taking care to remove the lunch first) and use it as a glove as I grab our unwelcome visitor. We discuss the possibility of giving him a swimming lesson in the toilet, but decide to release him back into the wild. I take him out onto the fire escape and release him with a cry of "fly my beauty!"

He flies like a piano, fully ten floors down to land almost audibly atop a white truck, where he lies motionless. The truck drives off. My day is just beginning.

***


Snippet from wikipedagogue:
In September 2006, amusement park Six Flags Great America announced it would be granting unlimited line-jumping privileges for all rides to anyone who could eat a live Madagascar hissing cockroach as part of a Halloween-themed FrightFest. Furthermore, if a contestant managed to beat the previous world record (eating 36 cockroaches in 1 minute), he would receive season passes for four people during the 2007 season. This is a difficult record to break because raw cockroaches contain a mild neurotoxin that numbs the mouth and makes it difficult to swallow. The promotion began on October 7, 2006, and ended on October 29, 2006.

Labels: NATURE

Dear diary

As you know, there are four seasons in Japan...

We can mark the changes of the seasons by what the Japanese are blaming the Chinese for.

In spring, for example, everybody scampers around 'neath the cherry blossoms, complaining that Chinese gyoza has given them the dire rear. Summer, meanwhile, is famous for the chirruping of cicadas and the chirruping of everyone else about how unagi (eel) of Chinese origin has been scandalously labelled as domestic produce and sold on to unsuspecting consumers, thereby placing them in grave danger of getting the dire rear.

These hot, heavy days are not without their compensations, although I, for one, long for the cooler season, when the serene progress of the archipelago into its autumnal phase will be indicated by everyone clamming up about eels and mouthing off about Chinese matsutake mushrooms instead.

Labels: BUNKA, NATURE

For all of you who enjoyed last year's action as Dan took out comically-named bugs as they scuttled round his apartment, here's our first installment for 2008.

Bug #1: "Hillary"

Very big, black bug. I suddenly noticed him scuttling up my wall towards the ceiling. A fierce whack with a towel brought him down to earth, where he lay, twitching feebly. I rummaged out a bottle of washing up liquid and administered the coup de grace, whereupon he expended the last of his energy pushing himself over onto his back to assume the now-legendary "dead cockroach" position. (Why do they always do that?)

I was going to dub him "Edmund Hillary" in recognition of his climbing exploits. On further consideration, I decided that "Hillary" would be sufficient.

Labels: NATURE