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Eric engages with nature - almost

The trap is sprung

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Monday, 4 May 2009

Spring is here, and like a lamb with one eye on the abattoir I start to stretch and enjoy the new life that it thrusts into the city. The wonderful Uncle Monty once said that flowers were prostitutes for bees, and as for what that makes the trees, with their swollen urgent buds, flapping catkins and tawdry verdant blossoms I don’t dare think. It’s like a Barcelona backroom out there at the moment. It’s all in your face.

Spring is like some threat from nature, with a backing chorus of nasty squawking birds, that here we go again, another round of seasons, of trying to find a pair of sunglasses that don’t make me look like a paedophile in training, some shorts that show my knees off to their best advantage and a goldilocks thong for the beach. One that’s not going to make me look like a doubly incontinent heavily scared self hating pre-op Thai lady boy on remand.

It’s too much all this budding, flowering fecundity. I can hardly keep up. I’ve got greenfly in my window box and a mouse has been at my bulbs, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I’ve tried poisons for the greenfly, but they just asexually shrug at me and with a Darwinian nod, adapt so that they can feed anew. They breed faster than Peacehaven schoolgirls and have reduced my black tulips to a twisted purple knob. The greenfly will take over the world and I am reduced to swiping at them with moist tissue and weeping. I can’t poison the mice, the idea of them nibbling at my sweet little bulbs and then carrying the invisible poison back off to their little mousy wives and mouse babies, then vomiting up blood as the poison hit’s their veins and starts to dissolve their kidneys, their little mousy babies wide eyed with mouse horror and rodent shock. Confused and scared as they nudge their little mousey noses at the inert corpses of their parents.

It’s too much for me, I’m haunted by the sad lonely squeaks of baby mice whose parents have shuddered and twitched to a halting death in front of their little mousey eyes. Hordes of orphaned baby mice starving to death cursing me in their high little voices. I don’t want to become the Kali of the mouse world. It’s not that I’m kind, gentle or (god forbid) a vegan, I can handle the swift snap of a trap, breaking spines in a moment and the lingering Judas smell of cheese, I can cope with cats toying and ripping their soft grey mouse bodies open for what passes for cat fun. That’s the real message of spring, life anew, death to follow. Without winter there’s no spring and we all, if we think about it, know what’s coming next. We’re going to get exactly what we deserve.