She’s definitely toilet-trained

 

They say trouble comes in threes.  As a French house-keeper, that’s certainly been my experience.  Do you suppose the French translation for that could be ménage a trois – or might I be muddling my metaphors?

Personally, I consider myself to have got off lightly if there are less than half a dozen catastrophes waiting to greet me when I arrive in France.  But, for once, it did seem that this time there really were only three.  Mind you, they were all pretty major.  What with the neighbour having lost two of his fingers in the garden (and believe me, I’ve been keeping a sharp eye out in case I find any more), and the house being overrun with mice, I felt that was more than enough to take in, but the third waited until my defenses were well and truly down, then snuck up on me from behind…

The toilet wouldn’t flush.

I presumed it was probably caused by lime build-up in the cistern, so opened it up and immersed my arms up to the elbows in freezing water, trying to wipe away the offending crusts of lime and generally de-clog the innards of the cistern.  Then I tried flushing.

Nothing doing.  Even after half an hour of serious de-scaling, the loo absolutely refused to co-operate.

Being particularly broke at the moment, I was loath to call a plumber and end up spending a small fortune on what must surely be a simple job.  Asking Achilles for help was definitely out…  So, as a last resort, I looked up ‘toilet cisterns’ on the Internet.

I learned that a ballcock is no longer called a ballcock.  It’s now known as a float valve.  And the intrinsic workings of a cistern revolve around a siphon, which has a diaphragm.  And, having dismantled my own toilet, I discovered that the diaphragm was – rather like Achilles’ fingers – déchirée.

Realising that there was little I could do, I ended up calling the plumber after all, and asking him if he could come and fix the problem.  He’d come in three days, he said.  Until then, I was quite happy, in true Kenya bush-fashion, to revert to a bucket flush – and it was a good excuse not to have house-guests.

When the plumber arrived he assessed the situation.  Various grunts and expletives – vache! meaning ‘cow’, but upgraded to ‘bitch’ by the exclamation mark, is one of the most popular at times like these – filtered down the stairs to me.  Things weren’t going well, I feared.  Eventually, I was summoned upstairs.  With much shrugging of shoulders and rolling of eyes, and no small measure of heavy sighing, he demonstrated to me how his spare part – a French flushing unit for a French toilet – didn’t fit in my English toilet.  (Years ago, when Mum had the barn converted into a house and had yet to master the local lingo, she’d hired a team of English builders, told the neighbours they were her nephews, and ensconced them in her tiny caravan in the garden, while they did the renovations.  They’d come across the Channel in a large white van, crammed with materials bought in England – and that included the loo.  It had seemed a good idea at the time.)

To prove his point, the plumber demanded a ruler.  I fetched one.  He measured the pipe leading from the base of the toilet into the wall.  And then he measured the pipe in his flushing unit that would feed from the base of the toilet into the cistern.  And there were two millimetres difference in the dimensions.  This meant that not only would the French part not fit in the toilette anglaise – but also, were I to get rid of the old loo and exchange it for a new French one, then the entire plumbing would have to be changed as well.  Plenty of appropriate expletives (that didn’t include vache!) went through my mind.

There was nothing for it but to source a spare from the UK.  The plumber took his leave and told me to call him when I got the new part and he’d come and fit it for me.

Four weeks of bucket flushes later, and a friend came over from England, bringing me the long-awaited spare part.  In great excitement, I called the plumber.  When he arrived, once again I waited downstairs while he wrangled the new unit into the old cistern.  Eventually I heard the reassuring sound of flushing water.  Wreathed in smiles, the plumber descended the stairs and announced success.  I paid him and he left.  And I took the bucket downstairs.

Old habits die hard.  When I got up that night for a pipi, I didn’t bother to flush, so it wasn’t until morning that I was ready to put the loo through its paces.  At first pull, the wretched thing broke.

Vache!

Playing Cat and Mouse

There’s a saying – fish and friends ‘begin to smell after three days’.  Well, perhaps it’s time to amend that old adage.  There’s distinctive whiff of eau de souris in the kitchen.  And that’s mouse wee (and poo) to me and you.

I noticed it the moment I walked into the house, after having been away for the winter.  Oh dear.  I supposed I’d have to entice the wretched little creature out and banish it to the woods.  These days Noir isn’t up to keeping the mice at bay, but it’s hardly surprising.  She’s about twenty years old, arthritic, deaf and blind in one eye!  Although I’d have no problem with her killing them, I must admit, I’ve never minded the odd mouse-guest.  They’re such sweet little things, and who can blame them looking for a bit of warmth in such a harsh winter?  Generally, they just move in and sleep, and leave again in the spring – don’t they?

After I’d been back about a week, I did begin to notice randomly scattered poos pretty much everywhere I looked – as if a child had carelessly spilled a packet of chocolate sprinkles whose contents had rolled to the four points of the compass about the house – particularly in the kitchen.  I was starting to feel like Cinderella, with all the sweeping I was doing (although, if I’m not mistaken, her mice didn’t leave a trail of droppings behind them – even when they turned into horses).  And the smell seemed to be getting stronger.  I began opening cupboards and drawers, trying to find the culprit.

The more I searched the more I found – poo, that is.  One corner of the larder was knee deep in it.  (Mouse knees, obviously.)  I could see my usual concoction of lemon-and-vinegar wasn’t going to be a match for the embryonic plague hatching among my tins, and jars and boxes of foodstuff, so invested in some bleach.  Rolling up my sleeves and donning rubber gloves, I went to work.

This mouse seemed to exist on a diet of tinfoil and pine nuts, if the shredded tubes and packets were anything to go by, so I began baiting the traps with pine nuts.  Nothing doing.  I got out my field guides and read that in the wild mice will eat berries, so sacrificed a few precious raspberries from my breakfast smoothies, to dangle from the hooks in the cage traps.  Each morning, the raspberries would have been chewed away, but the cages remained open.  Evidently, my poor starving little mouse was so tiny that his weight made no impression on the hair-trigger trap-door.

Each day, there’d be another liberal scattering of droppings back where I’d just cleared them away.  I was getting frustrated, and more than a little cross – and the smell refused to go away.  So, I decided to employ a high-tech strategy, and set up my brother’s remote camera to try to catch Monsieur Mouse in the act, and see if I could devise an alternative way of catching him.

I was in for a shock the following morning, when I played back the CCTV footage.

There were masses of mice.

One shot revealed three of them all together – and a new crime scene…  Not satisfied with meagre raspberries…  they were polishing off the leftovers of Noir’s supper.  She’s a little-and-often girl, and likes to save half her supper for a midnight feast – and evidently she’s definitely not getting the lion’s share of the spoils.

There’s no denying it – the camera doesn’t lie and the truth was, I was all of a sudden pretty worried about just how many unwanted guests I was providing board and lodging to.

It was time for desperate measures.  Much as I hated doing it, I invested in some SuperCat traps.  (Ironic?)  I won’t go into the details, but let’s just say they take no prisoners – and draw a discreet curtain over the ensuing proceedings…

…A couple of nights later, I woke to a howling gale and the sound of wind whistling eerily through all the mouse-holes in the 200-year-old roof, and gently swaying the tall Normandy barn (which has no foundations to speak of).  We’re quite used to these tempetes and tend to reassure ourselves that as the building has stood for so long, it will probably weather a few storms yet…  So I wasn’t unduly worried – until I heard a spooky ‘clump-clonk, clump-clonk’ slowly ascending the stairs.  It sounded like a man with a wooden leg was coming to get me.  I froze, terrified.

After a minute or two the sound abated, and I breathed again.  Another few seconds’ pause was followed by a gentle bounce on the mattress as Noir landed next to me.  Instead of insinuating herself beneath the duvet as is her wont, she climbed onto my pillow and pushed her nose in my face, giving a low mew (which is her way of waking me up at about half past six every morning).  As it was actually about 2.00 a.m., I pushed her down to the end of the bed telling her, in no uncertain terms, to go to sleep.

With that, there was a thunk, and she’d jumped back down to the floor.  Suspicious noises began emanating from the doorway.  I could no longer just lie there and do nothing.  I switched on the light.

Noir was walking towards the bed, with the rear end of a mouse in her mouth.  The front half of the mouse was attached to a mousetrap.  As Noir dragged her macabre prize determinedly towards me (‘clump-clonk, clump-clonk’), I could only smile.

As far as my own Super Cat was concerned, she’d caught dinner, and wanted to share it.

Homecoming

Homecoming

When I first arrived back in France my neighbour greeted me with two alarming pieces of news.  One (which actually paled into insignificance, once I’d heard the other), was that my home is infested with rodents.

With relish, Achilles regaled me with accounts of how, so far during my absence, he’d caught over twenty – a few dormice, but mainly mice.  One day his wife, Odette, had been over here feeding the puss cat, whose mousing days – along with her eyesight and hearing – are long-gone.  On opening the pedal bin to throw away the empty food packet, Odette was startled by a frantic scrabbling as out tumbled two baby mice, but – Achilles assured me – she still had the presence of mind to stamp on them both.

Now, I’m an animal lover.  I don’t like to hear stories of pain (or worse) inflicted on animals, and dislike it when these tales are told with evident enjoyment.  Achilles knows I only use cage traps when I catch the dormice – who usually practice their carpentry skills in the oak beams that hold what’s left of the roof up.  I know he champions the use of spring traps to kill any house invaders, but I always leave my home with the cages on prominent display and hope that if signs of squatters start to show, that he will do the honourable thing and catch the culprits, and then – as I do – translocate them to live happily ever after in a distant forest.

“Ha!” I hear you cry – “They’ll be straight back!”  They won’t, you know.  I’ve evolved a strategy which works.  I know it’s true these mice and dormice and other denizens of the world of Beatrix Potter purportedly have strong homing instincts – and why shouldn’t they?  I’ve worked with giraffes in Kenya, who were once translocated 60 kilometres, and found their way back to their home ground (having been marked with splashes of blue paint on their necks, in a prescient move by the wildlife vet).  But my unwanted house guests happen to have much shorter legs.  And I’m not talking about driving a couple of hundred metres down the lane and dropping them off in a ditch.  Uh-uh.  This is a science.

The first time I was faced with ‘dealing with the dormice’, I went to a pet shop (something I never do, as I hate the places – all those caged songbirds trilling frantically, while giddy fish swim in ever-decreasing circles round their bowls and fat hamsters contemplate their fates) and I bought a mouse house.  Quite a large one actually.  I furnished it with the cardboard tubes from kitchen rolls, and a few sheets of paper, and an apple and old crust of baguette.  And then I installed it in the garage.

Next, I laid my traps – small cages with dangling jujubes (they have eclectic tastes ranging from peanut butter to apple to Twix) and waited.  Sure enough, in the night the slamming of a cage door woke me.  Followed by the shrill screech of a dormouse.  Oh no! I imagined somehow it must have got trapped in the door, and padded from my bedroom feeling sick to the stomach, with visions of a magician’s badly-executed (so to speak) trick going through my mind.  Inside the trap was a large dormouse, scuttling to and fro.  And on the beam above, was another dormouse, yelling at it – “You STUPID IDIOT!  I told you not to go in there…”  (In a rather squeaky French accent.)

I took the trap downstairs and covered it with a cloth until morning.

By which time, the other trap had two young dormice in.  Gorgeous little creatures with adorable Pierrot faces and Zorro masks, and pretty tufted tails.  I took the three of them to the garage and translocated them one at a time into their new temporary accommodation – The DORchester Hotel.

In another couple of days, there were five.  Enough, I felt, to warrant a translocation.  And off we all toddled, eighteen kilometres, to the Foret de Belleme.  I had to drive miles up and down forest tracks to find a quiet corner that hadn’t already been staked out by mushroomers (hopefully the convoluted meandering further befuddled the homing instincts of my passengers), but eventually I found a dell of towering oaks and beeches, which – given their propensity for devouring the stuff in my home – appeared to meet the requirements of a Dormouse Des-Res.  And I opened the door of the Dorchester.  Out they ran – almost hand in hand – and dived for cover under the first hollow log they came to, tails disappearing one after another.  Beatrix would have painted a wonderful picture.

Job done.  I was delighted and, after refuelling the car in readiness for another safari, carried on home to reload the cages for the next batch…

But I’m digressing.  The point being, I don’t want to hurt anything – but equally, I’d prefer it if nothing hurt me – or my house.  I supposed I’d have to deal with the mice and resolved to dust out the Dorchester.

I’d noticed Achilles had his arm in a sling, and the wrist and hand were bandaged, and I asked him what he’d done?

“I injured myself while I was cutting the grass at your house.” he said, in rather tragic tones. I felt suitably guilty, but slightly exasperated at the same time.  (Especially as I pay someone to come and cut the grass at my house, specifically so that Achilles, who has a damaged neck, doesn’t have to.)  Sighing inwardly, and preparing myself for drama, I pressed him for more details.

It turned out, he’d decided that in order for Yves to come and cut the grass with our mower, stabled in one side of the garage, Achilles would make life a little easier, and mow the grass in front of the garage doors (which, in early Spring was already shin-deep), to allow them to open more easily.  Having done this, he decided to further perfect the situation by spreading a tarpaulin over the now trim area so that the grass wouldn’t grow back before Yves came.  But then he had another thought.  In order that Yves didn’t accidentally run his mower over Achilles’ tarpaulin, Achilles decided to mow a boundary along the edge of the spread canvas, and this he proceeded to do.  At one point, he bent down from his seat on his small tractor-mower and lifted up the canvas to allow the blade of the mower to skim just beneath the canvas for a really smart finish.  Except, his fingers got in the way…

“What do you mean?”  I was aghast.

He smiled, enjoying the moment.  “Bah, oui!” he nodded, opening the sling to allow me a peek at his left hand, while telling me the blade had caught two of his fingers.  Apart from looking like the limb of a long-dead Egyptian mummy, I was none the wiser.  The whole hand appeared to be there – bandaged into something of a cloven hoof, in a rather misshapen ‘V’ sign, but I was pretty sure I could discern digits beneath the swaddling.

“What do you mean, ‘caught your fingers?’”  All this of course was spoken in French, a language in which I am far from proficient.

“Déchiré!”  Achilles affirmed.  My mental French-English dictionary sprang to life…  Torn, ripped, severed…

Maybe I looked confused?  Achilles hadn’t finished with me.

“Do you want to see them?”

As I started shaking my head, he continued, “They’re in the fridge.”