On dead rats and devotion

Learning the unwelcome art of rodent disposal in the name of love

It was the first snow of the year.

We watched from our tiny office window as what can only be described as a very light sprinkling descended upon us on Thursday morning, making a typical WFH day seem almost ethereal.

The world was silent in that beautiful, nostalgic way, and while the pavements and roads weren’t having any of it, a few flakes began to settle on the grass and the plants in the garden.

And while Jack Frost was busy delicately dusting the world with snow, I, armed with a spade and a bin bag, was delicately extracting a dead rat from the attic.

The joys of homeownership.

We – or rather, Liam – had discovered it in the darkest parts of the roof of our house while checking for potential leaks. We decided this unexpected (and expired) lodger had to go – and I would be the one to do it.

After much grunting and swearing, and a handful of apologies to the deceased, I grabbed it, disposed of it, stripped, showered, made a cuppa, and returned to work as if nothing had happened.

It was not the most magical way to spend the first snowy day of the season, but it was reality.

Unbelievably, this wasn’t the first time I’d had to dispose of a dead rodent.

Around a decade ago, when I lived in a house share, someone’s guinea pig appeared at the bottom of the garden when my two housemates were on holiday.

I awoke on the first morning they were gone, filled with the lightness that comes with having the place to yourself, and opened the curtains to see a shock of orange fur at the end of the lawn, unmoving. A fox’s dinner, abandoned.

After a few (punishingly hot midsummer) days, it remained unclaimed, and so I decided to do the right thing, having been a guinea pig owner myself as a child: give the poor soul a proper burial at the top of my live-in landlady’s garden.

This decision to give it the send-off it deserved, however, came after a few post-work drinks.

And so I found myself, a few rum-and-cokes later, with a pashmina tied around my mouth and nose for fear of ‘smells’, wielding a trowel in the depths of the garden at sundown, determining this poor creature’s final resting place.

Months later, as I returned home from the office, I noticed that a house a few doors down had left an empty hutch outside for the next bin collection.

Moving in together isn’t just about choosing paint and building flat-pack furniture. When you live with someone – and love someone – you slowly learn to divide the nastier jobs between you based on your strengths and tolerance for the grim stuff. Yes, it’s about balance and fairness, but it’s also about protecting eachother from the things that make your stomachs turn, or skin crawl.

It’s funny how you manage to find your niche when it comes to the delegation of disgusting responsibilities. Bins, bogs, blockages.

Liam, it turns out, is a dab hand at unclogging our Victorian drainage system, and I am a pro at rodent retrieval.

So remember: behind all the idyllic posts you see online, whether there’s snow or sunshine, there’s probably someone, somewhere, up in an attic, gingerly handling a dead rat, trying their hardest to breathe through their mouth.