Cold bicycle friendly hamster loving cat and snake weekend...

SO MY NONEXISTENT POLITICAL MANIFESTO has failed to inspire y'all... what a surprise! The only "policy" I can devise for my constituency would be bike lanes for all. Yes! Up on the pavement too, not down with the dirty rumbling traffick where white van drivers will try and run you over. Cycle paths are cheaper to install than almost anything else (less wear and tear)... so that's my no 1 policy. Also when I was thinking of making a Mayor of London bid back in 1998/whenever (it was the year Jeffrey Archer finally got found out for perjuring himself in his record-breaking court case against the Star newspaper, for which he got $1 million damages and was punished for 3 years in prison)... My main policy back then was to have different coloured bulbs installed in London's street lights so it would look ultra-pretty from the skies for American tourists flying into Heathrow... See my priorities, as per usual, are in totally the right place...

My room is running alive with wild mice! They are "nesting" somewhere in my big cupboard. The one that is stuffed with binbags full of my rotting "possessions"... I haven't the heart to destroy their mousey home, but if they dare come near my robos, trust me it won't be the robos doing the squeaking...

I can't exactly ask the landlord to put antirodent stuff down seeing as I have 4 pet rodents of my own... and I hate to admit it but my own rodents have probably attracted this lot in. Before now they were running amok in Laundretta's room only. Though I did hear Matran "the Rat-Man" was putting down cheese for a particularly cute one to feast upon.

She catches hers on ultrasticky cockroach/mouse/rat "traps" (ie bits of supersticky card) and throws them out of the window where she likes to think they instantaneously die. Of course they don't. Down they sail like a mousey hang-glider to scuttle about the pavements with the dead autumn leaves, stuck to this massive sticky mouse-windsurfer-sail for days on end until some passerby either treads on them or a cat spags at them and gores them or they simply starve to death. In other words the cruelest, most horrible way to go.

Unfortunately the "humane" traps available in this area are made by a company called "The Big Cheese" and are the stupidest traps I've ever seen. Too small for any wild mouse to venture inside, they work on a seasaw motion... and in other words trap no mice. The ones we had in Wales that DID work were transparent (so the mouse doesn't feel so enclosed) and tripped shut on a garage-door type mechanism. They were big enough to capture two or three mice at once if that number happened to simultaneously venture inside. At one point my stepbrother set up a Wild Mouse Rotastak with about ten of them inside. They were so entertaining running their little wheel like hyperactive swines. Eventually even our cat got tired of and desensatized to them. Then they got tired of about 2 square feet of living space and settled down to spend their entire lives cossetted in Johnson & Johnson cotton wool abed...

Finally I gave Dodge his card. (His 89-year-old Dad had a stroke at the weekend adn died 2 or 3 days ago...) It sounds like all traumas are stretching forth amongst family, the way they tend to when someone dies and disparate relatives are suddenly thrown together and it's not even Xmas yet... Believe it or not I seem to be the ONLY person to have given in a card... And to think I was embarrassed at having left it 3 days... what is today's society coming to?

Now I've caught a thorough pipe-cleaning cold. I've always thought an (uncomplicated nonbronchitis-stylee) cold is a good thing to have as it paradoxically cleans the system out and rejuvenates the body. Nobody else ever seems to agree with me. Perhaps because they're the Lemsip, Benylin and Nightnurse posse who overdose themselves on blurry antihistamines to make themselves feel iller. Science is aparently on my side. "Common" colds (and mine's especially vulgar) do boost the body's levels of interferon which has magical effects on more serious diseases*. Better to have slews of common colds, I say, than terminal cancer!

(*Yes! Interferon is part of a two-drug hep C treatment AND has a protective role against cancers of many kinds.)

Well I'm off to go abed and feel sorry for myself as I have to blow my nose... wow! Nearly once an hour. I'm so ill!

Gotta go seriously and scribble out more of my memoirs. We're at a bit of a slow patch now - I'm writing about my first suicide attempt and my trip home when I was aparently staring at the wall and "rocking" (no wonder! After 70 tricyclic antidepressant pills... thankfully I puked the vast majority so quickly their red coatings were all mixed in the porridgey diced carrot vomit...

So I didn't die and I have to go I'm busting for a wee... Too much cyder = "personal" Niagra falls...

See yous all tomorrow.

PS I see NOBODY but one "anonymous" remarked on my "cat and hamster" from Japan. That was 100% real! They were genuine friends. Didn't you see the cat licking the hamster and then the hammy lick the cat in return and snuggle up for a sleepy evening's TV or whatever Japanese pets do...

My today's vid is:

Japanese Rat Snake and Hamster Friend

Sorry no subtitles or dubbing for the petshop manager's prattling but I do like the bit where the hammy decides to make a nest amongst the serpent's scaly coils then thinks better of it and hops out...

I wonder how long the hamster really lasted, or whether the snake just wasn't hungry that day? Or whether he'd just got BORED of the taste of tubby Campbells dwarves... who noze...?

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Have a cheery weekend everyone!

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Just for Whitenoise, here's Sylvia Plath's Insomniac poem....

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PETS' CORNER RIP SPONGEBOB, Vi Vi Voom's lionhead goldfish. Who died of mysterious infection...