Nightmare on Roman Street (well, the A46, anyway)

Last week was a loving MummyRat’s week from hell; first of all there was a bug going around Rat Towers that appeared to affect most of the older rats in residence, and second there were sadly two fatalities as a result – first of all my lovely Nurse Grissom, and then the big, strong Woolie who went from being nearly 600g in weight to 350g in less than a week. Grissom left us on Friday 17th April, after Mummy and DaddyRat had taken a coach-full of students to the Gadget Show in Birmingham. Upon returning home, there was the sad little body of the loveliest rat in the world waiting to have his little funeral, with Woolie dying in MummyRat’s arms the day after. Two little bodies, two funerals. So sad. The good news is that the other boys appear to be recovered from the bugs they were host to; Delko spent Sunday curled up being a Poor Sick Rat on MummyRat’s knee, but perked up after a bit of spoiling.

The new batch of six boys are still in their little cage awaiting their transference into Rat Towers; all appear to be really friendly and extremely intelligent people, with Shovel (Spade is his Sunday name) consistently outsmarting both devoted parents with ease. Little Tony (beautiful white rat with pink eyes) isn’t doing too well, sadly – he’s still tiny and isn’t putting on any weight – but he seems happy enough. If he doesn’t improve within the week, he’s going for a Trip To See The Vet. He’ll love that.

Well…. It had to happen. After the loss of Grissom and Woolie we had two vacancies in Rat Towers to fill. A trip to Pets at Home was made yesterday… and two more boys were selected to join the throng. First of all a little brown and white boy was appointed to replace Grissom (a very hard job of work to do) but in this case he’s a dumbo and Nurse Grissom wasn’t. Second, a comparatively big boy was interviewed – he’s a big round brown dumbo and is the new Woolie. He spent an hour this morning on MummyRat’s knee, and managed to charm the entire household by being loving, friendly and extremely TIRED requiring a nap at frequent intervals. He is probably one of the sweetest natured little rodents to employ Mummy and DaddyRat as owners.

On consideration, probably the reason that Woolie was so Tired was due to the journey home from Lincoln to Grantham – thirty hectic miles in which Woolie managed to eat his way out of the box in which he was inserted with considerable lack of dignity in the Lincoln store, and after incorporation into Grissom’s box was a good way through snicking his way out of that too. MummyRat had to blow into his nostrils in order to get him to behave in an orderly fashion – that gave him cause to think for a nano-second before normal service was resumed and chewing recommenced. By the end of the journey both new boys were sitting on a piece of box the size of a postage stamp surrounded by chewed pap and MummyRat was blue through lack of oxygen.

Interestingly, when we were introducing the new boys to some of the older boys, New Woolie and Simon went shuffling off into a corner and were whispering together, clearly hatching some devious plot. Five minutes later, Simon – who is the Rat Towers Raffles in that anything that is shiny is INSTANTLY desirable to Simon and therefore must become his property (there was an unsavoury occurrence where Simon and DaddyRat had a tug of war over an empty crisp packet that Simon was determined to own and DaddyRat was equally determined that he himself would keep) and the cunning Simon had clearly made a snap assessment in that New Woolie would be a worthy ally in his quest to denude MummyRat of all her jewellery; New Woolie is the Ideal Straight-Man to Simon’s Stand-Up. Ten minutes later, MummyRat noticed that she’d lost two bracelets, three earrings, one ring and a necklace and Simon was peering through his magnifying glass at the hallmarks on his plunder.

MummyRat has the feeling that she’s going to be shopping at Accessorize rather than Goldsmiths in future…