The mice in the attic have come back. Lying in bed last night I could hear them scratching and scraping above my head, one of them was making so much noise I thought it was going to come through the ceiling. This is not a new development. Ever since we moved in they have been a recurring theme. Just as your head hits the pillow they start with their night time activities. You can win a battle but you can never win the war - let me explain.
The first time I heard them I thought a squirrel had got into the roof space, or maybe a rat, that’s how loud they were. So I went up there to investigate, squeezing through the small entrance into the loft. It soon became obvious it was mice because several of them wandered passed me, bold as brass, heading for the other end of the building.
I’m not fond of this roof space which is full of a hundred years of muck, debris and dust. There’s an old wasps nest right next to where you poke your head up when first entering the space and it looks like a carcass of some kind in the torchlight, and spider webs hang everywhere from underneath the stone slates. You have to watch where you tread for fear of putting your foot through the ceiling, and also negotiate several internal walls.
I’ve got nothing against mice and used to look after them when I was a kid and my parents wouldn’t allow us a dog. But you don’t want them taking over your house. The fact is they will find their way into your kitchen and piss all over your breakfast cereals. Mice have no bladder and are permanently urinating as they go about their daily routine. And they breed, oh boy can they breed, reproducing every few weeks so that numbers quickly quadruple.
Despite the fact they are a nuisance, I didn’t particularly want to kill them, so my first line of attack was defence - I blocked up every obvious entrance route into the attic. I went through with this expandable foam that sets as hard as rock and squirted it everywhere I thought the mice might be coming in. Then I got hold of some humane traps and set them to catch the mice.
It took several days for one of the mice to go into this trap and then, according to instructions, I had to transport it at least three miles away from our house so it wouldn’t find its way back. I let it go up on the moors where it would most likely perish anyway. I knew this wouldn’t be the end of the problem because mice are social creatures and rarelywork alone.
Sure enough, that night, as my head hit the pillow the mice started partying again. And this time my partner hated the noise so much she went and slept in another room, this was proving a serious issue. I was lying there, in the cold, with no-one to hug, listening to the mice enjoying themselves.
The blocking of any obvious routes into the attic was a waste of time, this whole house is riddled with spaces between floors and walls that stretch out into the joining properties. Mice can squeeze through the smallest of holes and it wasn’t going to be possible to block up every single one. It was worth a try, but turned out to be completely pointless. The overpriced humane traps were equally pointless. In fact I think the mice, which are not as stupid as we think, were extremely suspicious of crawling into those odd looking tubes of plastic.
None of my mouse friendly strategies had worked and the population had doubled in the time I’d taken trying to reduce their numbers by one. I really didn’t like it, but more drastic steps were needed. And these drastic steps involved a Mars bar, a drawing pin and the lid off a jar of honey.
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