gullybogan

Barbecue rat Monday 080728~23:16

Posted by gullybogan in Hygiene, Wildlife.
Tags: barbecue, environment, rats, Wildlife
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Dear Reader,

On Saturday some of Princess’s relations came over for a surprise visit. Presumably they drop in unannounced like that to check that i’m not, like, beating her up, or something.

I wasn’t beating her up, as luck would have it, so we all sat down to have a lovely tea party in the Conservatory, instead of them ringing the police.

The Conservatory looks out onto our pergola, where we have a little fern garden, an outdoor setting, and a barbecue. It’s all very lovely. We’re quite houseproud, the two of us. Considering.

As we’re sitting there, discussing the latest comings and goings in the celebrity world, i notice a quick movement out of the corner of my eye. I watch carefully but surreptitiously while the talk of the Brangelino twins goes on («…and one’s named ‘Knox’, after us!…» ) and before long i verify for myself that the quick movement is, in fact, a pair of bush rats, darting back and forth through the garden and disappearing under the barbecue.

I hope that the visitors don’t notice, because there’s all sorts of judgements that ppl make when they see that you have rats running around in your backyard. It’s almost tantamount to beating up your partner, rats. Almost. It’s certainly a reflection upon you as a person, as is mental illness and head lice.

Of course, Princess and me are fully aware that we live in the environment, and there’s rats in the environment, and so, sometimes, we have rats.

Sometimes we have Rosellas, too. And possums, and fruit bats, and Tawny Frogmouth Owls. We suspect foxes, and there’s cats for certain. It’s quite busy out there in the environment.

The discussion was just getting on to the possibility that Lindsay Lohan was a lesbian when Princess noticed the same quick movements that i’d been noting for some small amount of time.

«Oh! What was that!» she cried.

I hoped that she’d realise the potential consequences, and not draw any more of our visitors’ attention to the presence, a few feet away, of rats gambolling in the afternoon sunshine, but, alas, soon everyone was discussing the Bubonic Plague, and electrical roof fires, and what i was going to have to do to get rid of the rats.

Eventually, the visitors ran out of both rat eradication advice and celebrity small talk, and, since it was clear that i wasn’t going to be going out and dispatching the rats there and then, they left.

Which left me to examine the barbecue, which seemed to be the locus of their movements.

Sure enough, the rats had been inside the barbecue, and had even managed to knock the dripping tray down out of its spot beneath the burners so that they could feast upon the sausagey fat that had congealed there.

See, the idea is that you finish your barbecue, and then you leave the fat and grease all over the hotplates, to ‘season’ the cast iron pleasantly for next time. After all, you’ll be cooking on it again in a day or two. At which point, you give it a quick douche with some boiling water, a scrape with the barbie mate™, and off you go again.

Sadly, whoever used the barbecue last in the dying embers of last summer seems to have forgotten that, at the end of using the thing on a daily basis, you need to clean it out.

I’m not going to say who it was who forgot that, but i will say that it wasn’t me.

Still, cleaning the barbecue is a guy thing, so it was, ultimately, my fault.

So that was my Saturday afternoon and evening: cleaning not only the congealed fat and grease off of everything, but getting all the rat shit out of everything as well.

I was most impressed with how the rats had gotten that dripping tray down. It sits like a little hammock, about forty centimetres above the base of the cabinet. The rats must have stood on each others’ shoulders to reach it, and then they had to lift it out of its securing bracket and lower it (or drop it) so that it landed butter side up, so to speak.

On Big Brother, they had this stunt where BB lowered housemates headfirst into a big bowl of rats, each housemate having cheese on a skewer sticking out of their helmet. The rats did, in fact, clamber on top of one another to reach the cheese. It was pretty impressive.

It took me about three hours to scrub everything to a standard where Princess felt she could sizzle some sausages again.

Regardless, we had pasta.

Yours,
Gullybogan