I think I might have mice. I mean in my flat, not personally. That would be weird. But I am not sure as they might just have been a jet lag fuelled hallucination. Last night as I was drifting off into that weird sleep you get when you've had a long flight I was suddenly snapped back awake by a scratching sound. I thought someone was trying to break into my house, but once I was properly awake I couldn't hear it any more. I wondered if maybe it might have been some rodent running around in my skirting board.
Then this morning I was sitting in my dark lounge with the curtains closed, typing away on my computer, when out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw something scamper across the floor. But it was dark and I had just woken up and I wonder in hindsight whether I just imagined it, having had the seed planted in my brain in the middle of the night that there might be an infestation.
The last time I had mice in a house I lived in was back in the mid-90s when I lived in Clapham. At the time I was a vegetarian and I didn't know how to cope with these unwelcome guests. Surely killing them would be against my ethical beliefs, but then it was horrible having them scurrying around my worktops and pooing everywhere. One day I came into the kitchen and saw a mouse on the work surface and made a girly scream. It ran to hide under the spice rack and in a panic I threw cumin in its eyes and then trapped it there with a piece of board until I had worked out what to do with it. This was already a fairly cruel thing to do, but I was scared of the mouse and scared of the ethical repercussions and my flatmate was away for the weekend, so I just left it there. When my flatmate returned he dealt with it, taking the board away, finding the nearly dead, terrified creature and taking him outside to put him out of his misery. How horrible and evil and hypocritical I had been. After that I agreed that we had to kill them in a less evil way and we put down traps and then poison. And at least it inspired this
quite funny sketch (if you can ignore my overacting).
The mouse I had seen today out of the corner of my eye had seemed too big and dark and I wonder if it wasn't a jet-lag inspired mirage, but in fact a ghost of the other mouse, come to reek (or eek) its revenge. Only time will tell.
In other news in recognition of my return to sanity I have added the song LDN by Lily Allen to
my myspace page. I like her. She's funny. But as you know, I do like to help singer/songwriters
improve their lyrics. The bit that everyone loves in London is the audacious rhyming of Tesco with al Fresco in these lines -
"There was a little old lady, who was walking down the road
She was struggling with bags from Tesco
There were people from the city having lunch in the park
I believe that it's called al fresco"
But I think this would be better it went
"There was a little old lady, who was walking down the road
She was struggling with bags from Tesco
There were people in the park discussing the president of Romania, executed for genocide in 1989, I believe that he's called Ceauşescu."
You are welcome to put that in any future versions of the song, Lily. It's a lot cleverer than your one, which seems a bit forced to me.
In other news I made a baby cry in Caffe Nero. She had been left in her buggy by her mother, who was buying a coffee and was facing me, so I started pulling faces at her. I am usually very good at making kids laugh, but this baby looked confused by my antics, uncertain of what to make of them. I persisted, surely no-one could find Richard Herring unamusing- it's just not possible. But after about four minutes of funny faces and grimaces, the baby made up her mind, deciding I was not funny, but creepy and strange and she started to cry. I apologised to her mother who had finally returned and though the baby feared me (come on, not all comedians are paedophiles and even the ones you might think are were actually just researching a part, and to get into character it was important that they masturbated to actual child pornography to get into the mind of the pervert- nothing wrong with that) she kept looking over at me, as if to confirm that her reaction was correct. It did seem to be the confirmation she required.
After 20 years of making people laugh it is this small child who has seen through me and realised that I am not funny. The mote will fall from everyone's eyes now. It's over.
