‘There’s a flat rat under the mat!’ I shrieked, and wondered whether that was the sort of jaunty phrase that could be used for elocution lessons.
I had lifted this mat by the main staircase to hoover the floor beneath it and there it was, a perfectly flat rat in the shape of a cartoon dead rat beneath this mat.
I began laughing uncontrollably, because if you’ve ever seen a flat rat under a mat you will know that it is intrinsically funny, whatever your views on rats. You will laugh even if you don’t like rodents, of indeed if you like them way too much.
Even if you are a member of the Rat Preservation Society, when you see one flattened paper thin, stuck to your floorboards, I challenge you not to burst out laughing, while jumping up and down.
If you’ve ever seen a flat rat under a mat you will know that it is intrinsically funny
I shouted, and shouted, thinking the cleaner and the builder boyfriend would come running. But the BB continued chatting to the cleaner in the kitchen about why he didn’t like the local chip shop as she rinsed the mop bucket out, having mopped the painted black floorboards of the hallway without finding the flat rat under the mat, because the rat was also black, and he vaguely called in my direction; ‘What are you going on about?’
‘There is a flat… rat… under… the mat!’ I said, entering the kitchen to find the pair of them completely ignoring me.
I had come back from a lovely mini-break in Cyprus to find the house not as bad as I expected, and the BB had managed to get a glowing review from some American honeymooners. But there was a very faint, horrible smell.
I assumed it was him and the dogs, living as they please, but it was unusually pungent, even for them.
‘A rat?’ he said. ‘A dead rat,’ I said. ‘One of the cats must have caught it. But it’s petrified and flattened and stuck to the floorboards. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. There’s a flat rat under the mat!’
Turning to the cleaner, who is marvellous, I said: ‘I’m not surprised you didn’t find it. It’s completely fossilised.’ But they were still staring at me like I was speaking Swahili. The builder b then lifted the mat and confirmed that I wasn’t hallucinating. There really was a flat rat under the mat.
And we ruminated on how amazingly funny it would have been, in a Fawlty Towers sense, had it somehow been discovered by a very uptight guest, ideally a hotel inspector.
As the BB picked the rat up by the tail he declared it to be a mouse, which I’m not sure it was, threw it outside into the bushes and said: ‘Rat’s extra.’
I’ve always seen myself as Basil, but I’m coming to the view that the BB is Basil and I’m settling more and more into the role of Sybil, spotting the faults and the coming disasters and saving the place from calamity, while the BB swaggers about chatting with customers and staff about things that are absolutely irrelevant.
Sometimes he serves the coffee then comes back into the kitchen and marches up and down fulminating about foreigners and the cheek of people who want breakfast. He once did a marching impression after serving some Germans, just for the love of Basil, and in honour of John Cleese, who, it turns out, did not make any of this stuff up.
I regularly have to calm him down and tell him we have to change the beds and feed the guests something. ‘What do they want for €100?’ he rants. ‘Er, a clean room, fresh sheets, a hot shower and some toast in the morning. There’s really no way round it.’
Being Sybil is very tiring. So it was lovely to go to Cyprus for a week on my own, even if I did have to leave the BB in charge, to allow rats to accumulate under mats.
The other thing that happened in my absence is that he nearly sold the house to some American honeymooners who said they had fallen in love with it, and who were in the market for a big old Georgian pile in Ireland, or rather the man’s rich American father was. He said that he was scouting around for a country retreat for him while they were on their trip.
The BB saw euro signs – or pounds or dollars or whatever currency they wanted to pay in – and he started dreaming of a nice simple bungalow in the South of France with a swimming pool and some acres of pasture for the horses.
But we can’t really sell and implement stage two of our dastardly plan until we get our Irish passports, which we believe to be possible five years from our arrival date, which is two to three more years yet.
Once we, a couple of Brexiteers, get these Irish passports, we can then go and live anywhere in Europe
Once we, a couple of Brexiteers, get these Irish passports, we can then go and live anywhere in Europe, so long as we want to return to Ireland one day, which I’m sure we can assure anyone who asks that we do – and I know that there are people reading this who are so angry at me for being such a hypocrite they are even now composing bitter, furious letters.
I received one such when we first moved here. Inside a deceptively cheery card with a shamrock on the front a very angry person had scrawled: ‘Clear off then!’
I don’t blame him, or her. But to explain why we voted Brexit, then left the UK, would be too boring and unfunny. So I won’t. Suffice to say, we now look forward to getting our EU passports back, via living in Ireland, using the long-running reciprocal Anglo-Irish arrangements. We can then wander the entire continent, go to live in the best bits of Europe, have a whirl of a time in the Dordogne, and so on.
What? We are only doing what the whole world does in relation to our country of birth, which is to say access it in a sneaky way, whether by small boat or other method.
So I reminded the BB, when he was excitedly explaining how he might have sold the house to an American, that he’s two years too early at least.
Although knowing how long it takes to process anything in Ireland, if we start the conveyancing now, the sale might just complete by the time our passports come through in 2029.
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