Saturday, March 26, 2005
Rats Nest
I never venture further from the staff room or the classroom during school hours. The only break is taken inside the school and that really has become a clutter of old cardboard boxes full of papers which date back to the time when the Chinese first invented writing. We will soon be suffocating under the weight of all this precious gubbins.
Lord only knows what it is. One thing is for certain – no one looks at it – no one uses it and most of all – no one really knows what is contained in the mysterious cardboard boxes being stored for no apparent reason or purpose.
The furniture in the staffroom is circa 1950, wooden and dingy. I feel like a rat in a nest of cardboard. We are so crowded together there is no room to swing a cat. This being quite an appropriate phrase as recently the staffroom has become home to 2 cats that have been hired to keep the rats at bay.
It is true; we have rats living in the staffroom. My suggestion is get rid of the cardboard stash of gubbins then they loose their nest, but no, my advice landed on stony ground and 2 cats moved in.
We did have rather an exciting lunchtime when one of the intrepid felines chased a rat. My goodness it caused a stir. There was so many ladies standing on chairs and screaming it scared the cat away. I was half on and half off my chair and part of me was brave enough to put one foot on the floor as this gave me an excellent view of the more macho members of staff (2 of them!) chasing the dreaded rodent around the place with… you’ve guessed it.. A can of disinfectant! Excellent. Since SARS the Chinese have become very germ conscious and I can only surmise that the spraying of disinfectant in the general direction of the rat, which was moving pretty fast at his point, was to rid it of any germs. This seems a rather charitable course of action by the sprayer as the whole point was to get the cats to kill the damn thing (s).
I suspect that the witnessing of a death would have put most people off their lunch however, the Chinese members of staff do not seem to flinch at anything to do with killing animals or certainly not at eating any particular part of them. Rat on stick could be on the menu very soon!
Lord only knows what it is. One thing is for certain – no one looks at it – no one uses it and most of all – no one really knows what is contained in the mysterious cardboard boxes being stored for no apparent reason or purpose.
The furniture in the staffroom is circa 1950, wooden and dingy. I feel like a rat in a nest of cardboard. We are so crowded together there is no room to swing a cat. This being quite an appropriate phrase as recently the staffroom has become home to 2 cats that have been hired to keep the rats at bay.
It is true; we have rats living in the staffroom. My suggestion is get rid of the cardboard stash of gubbins then they loose their nest, but no, my advice landed on stony ground and 2 cats moved in.
We did have rather an exciting lunchtime when one of the intrepid felines chased a rat. My goodness it caused a stir. There was so many ladies standing on chairs and screaming it scared the cat away. I was half on and half off my chair and part of me was brave enough to put one foot on the floor as this gave me an excellent view of the more macho members of staff (2 of them!) chasing the dreaded rodent around the place with… you’ve guessed it.. A can of disinfectant! Excellent. Since SARS the Chinese have become very germ conscious and I can only surmise that the spraying of disinfectant in the general direction of the rat, which was moving pretty fast at his point, was to rid it of any germs. This seems a rather charitable course of action by the sprayer as the whole point was to get the cats to kill the damn thing (s).
I suspect that the witnessing of a death would have put most people off their lunch however, the Chinese members of staff do not seem to flinch at anything to do with killing animals or certainly not at eating any particular part of them. Rat on stick could be on the menu very soon!
