More barricading is obviously called for

We decide to board off what we perceive as the main entrance to the under the hall floorboard area. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Still two traps – one under the kitchen floor and one in the back room. Decide to put the under kitchen floor one above the floor – perhaps it never used the superhighway – to see if that improves our chances. Build a little box to put it in so that there’s no danger of it approaching it from the wrong end and triggering it from the back. Go to bed.

S goes to bathroom and says he can hear a hell of a noise from downstairs. We’re too frightened to go and look so shut bedroom door so we can’t hear it. Next morning we discover the cause of all the noise. It’s eaten its way through the floorboards. There’s a tale on a website of some folks who scoured a flat looking for a hole where a rat could have got in only to find it had gnawed it’s way vertically straight up through two inches of oak floorboard. We now believe this story. This is now a tale of how to exist on plastic and wood – not your average diet for sure.

Invest in third rat trap, hoping against hope that one of them will work. Folks in the hardware shop, whilst naturally glad of the trade in this economic clime, must think I’m desperate. Balance of probability is that they’re right. Now have three traps, at all strategic points, they’re all VERY poised to go, as in that still hurts!

How desperate can a rat get?

No evidence of interest in traps, but following morning discovered a cookery book had been half pulled out from the ones that were lying on top of the books in the bookshelf in the hall. No humans admitted moving it, after all why should they?, so pushed it back in and carried on.

Following morning discovered MORE cookery books half pulled out. Not so much that they fell on the floor, mind you, just about half way out. How bizarre! It’s as if the rat can’t find any ACTUAL food, and is having to make do with PICTURES OF FOOD instead. Had a quick look but there really wasn’t any evidence of real food there, so pushed the books back again.

Day 3 of the cookery book saga and yep, you guessed it, more cookery books but this time they’ve reached the floor. This is getting truly weird! And then I discovered the only thing it could have been after, which is a measure of just how desperate it must be and how very acute its sense of smell must be. On top of the cookery books was a well pressed spaghetti wrapper which I must have saved because of a recipe on it. It was empty but the way it had been pressed between books meant it was empty before Ratty got to it. But even more incredibly the sell by date on the packet was April 1995 – fourteen years ago! The price ticket is for not just the previous incarnation of the supermarket chain, but the one before that.

After that we went to a lot of trouble to make sure the back room door was shut every night. At least we could maybe prove that there was or wasn’t an alternative way to just blatantly walking through the door, which we thought was probably a bit brazen anyway, even for a rat. Bought another trap, put it behind the sewing machine in a quiet sort of place, not far from where it had tried to get at the drinks. Used Toblerone on this one, perhaps chocolate is better than stilton. Put an extra piece on the sort of lead-up to the trap – silly mistake, it ate that and ignored the trap. Now what?

Yes, it’s definitely on the inside

We've now become convinced it can get into the back room, when I discovered a lot of shredded plastic bag. There was a plastic sort of tier of shelves standing on the floor, and the middle one had Jess’ hiking/survival kit in it. Amongst this lot was a supermarket carrier bag with some of those little tubes of coffee/chocolate that you add hot water to when you want a hot drink. They’re very light and convenient when you’re on expeditions. The rat could evidently smell them (how strong a sense of smell is that?) but had approached the shelving from the back which is sort of slatted. It managed to pull part of the carrier bag through and then kept pulling and gnawing at it in an attempt to get to the food. It made a lot of ‘confetti’ on the floor and pulled all of the bag that it could through but of course the actual tubes were too big to fit between the slats so it eventually gave up and went away hungry. Well not quite that hungry because as already noted elsewhere it is partial to a bit of plastic.

In which I spend a lot of time attempting to rat-proof the house

We've decided that it could evidently get in under the old back door where there was a four inch gap which had only been cursorily filled in. One day this will be finished off properly. I spent a couple of hours clearing everything away from the area – a job which had needed doing for quite a while, I must admit – and then building what can best be described as a rockery out of every brick, stone, etc I could find to fill the not exactly rectangular gap. There was a lot of scrabbling noises that night, but was it on the inside or the outside?

Next morning, the rockery was still intact but a piece of rotten wood which had been just lying in the drain below had been dragged out. Had the rat climbed out and then pulled its little bridge after it?

S decided perhaps it could work its way up the outlet from the washing machine and get in that way. Cue to remove everything (and there was a lot of it) from the top of the washing machine so that we could see what needed blocking round the back. Several hours later – nope, no way in there anyway.

Over the next few days various scuffling noises here and there. It is clearly able to move about overground in the kitchen as it’s found another stash of bulbs and seeds left over from previous years which I’d completely forgotten about. So - yet more clearing away and throwing out (at least they were past their use-by dates). S thinks the trap might be a bit unstable as it’s across three pipes, not all the same diameter, so thinks we should have a bit of wood underneath to help. This, of course, involves more lying on the floor, fiddling about and more unintentional firings of the trap – which is very painful.

The following morning we discovered it had attempted to get at the packet of tea bags which were on the lowest shelf. It had gnawed a couple of holes but then evidently pulled the packet over on itself which must have frightened it into running away. Unless it just prefers coffee.

S came down into the kitchen and saw it run towards him and disappear under the cooker. So, we’ve both seen it now but he thinks it’s not so big. Still not interested in trap, so S suggests we put the trap in the under the kitchen floor trough which he says is “the rat run”. This is easier said than done because a) you have to lay on the kitchen floor to be able to reach in there and b) the trough’s actually fairly full of pipes (when we rebuilt the kitchen we installed these fantastic troughs and gullies so that all the pipework could be routed under the floor and just come up at the right places. This was an admirable plan but failed to take account of the fact that now we have a rat superhighway enabling it to pop up here, there and indeed everywhere.) Anyway baited this with stilton to make it very smelly. Let's see how we fare with this one.