by I spent yesterday afternoon recovering from a very intense teachers v students Futsal match and celebrating the end of a successful year with my team at The End bar. They serve a remarkable stout made with local coffee, simply delicious. I’d buy it by the bottle if I could. The End is in the space where a Brisbane institution once resided. Trash Video was the best video store. A massive curated collection of pulp, cult, foreign and just plain weird cinema. The store struggled through the first wave of P2P sharing but went under like the vast majority of others as piracy became more convenient and normalised in Australia.
I got home in time to put L & F to bed. Watched some increasingly disappointing Jessica Jones with N. Created a bucket trap and set the rat kill traps.
Since the flood event in May we have had repeated rodent incursions. The night of the flood we could hear chittering in the walls. Those first rats were tenacious and took weeks to eliminate. One built a nest behind the oven, which required the landlord’s intervention to remove.
Since then it’s been like there is a little neon sign over the drains below our house with “Land of Milk and Honey Motel: Vacancy!” emblazoned on it. We’ve had a respite of a month or so, until last weekend we saw a young mouse. Since then we have seen at least three more, all adorable with the foolhardy fearlessness of young rodents. We had a clean kill the night before last. Not so last night.
Nadine nudged me awake at one saying that the trap in the kitchen had gone off. It had caught a mouse by the paw. I crushed the pitiful creature’s skull with a hammer and disposed of its corpse. All handled in the semi conscious fug of the middle of the night. I don’t like killing things, cute little furry animals least of all. On my most recent visit to my father’s house he killed a rat that had taken up residence in my stepmother’s book shop. He reflected afterwards that this business of killing things seems to have remained firmly in the realm of men’s business. Maybe in other relationships that is not the case, but it is true enough of mine as well.
Phone bus commute post – Edited for clarity at home.
I am trapping many mice these days, some in the greenhouse and some around the house where they get inside the walls and can be heard eating the (expensive & difficult-to-replace) insulation. I have learnt to bang them on the head myself finally
One of my early memories of my grandmother, nana Leedham, was her handling of the axe. The Sunday lunch served to the family was roast chicken. An unlucky chook, quickly dispatched, was plucked and in the old fuel stove, in a very short amount of time. As kids we were fascinated by the body running around headless. If a chicken needs the chop then it is now me that does the job.
I suspect this could be a very long conversation. The male/female lines it falls along may be an urban phenomena. It could be that women want in some subconscious way to both have their mates demonstrate “manliness” and their own feminity.
It could be a symptom of our disconnect with our food supply. Omnivores need to be able to prepare their own food. If meat is always a plastic wrapped tray from supermarket and there is no reality that this entails the death of an animal, then there is an inherent hypocrisy in being a meat eater.
I would also make the case that women get to clean up a lot of vomit, shit and other yucky stuff as part of being primary child carers and that this is a way of balancing the scales.