Many writers have shared their thoughts with the public:

"There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they'll take you." - Beatrix Potter

"The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say." - Anaïs Nin

"Sharing your writing, being enlarged by others' writing, is what makes you feel famous." - Gretchen Bernabei

"Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth." - Edna Ferber

"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing." - Ben Franklin

"One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones to form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment." - Hart Crane

"There are three rules for writing. Unfortunately, no one can agree what they are." - W. Somerset Maugham

Of Mice And Mechanics

Remember Aesop’s fable about the town mouse and the country mouse? How on the whole you came away thinking the latter had won the moral struggle and retired with justifiable self-satisfaction, to a simple rural existence tending his tomatoes? And then there was Tom and Jerry. Who did you barrack for? Our literary and television culture has been pretty kind to mice. Considering…

The other day I took the family station wagon in for a service. We live just outside a small country town on a bush block, and what with carting the kids (and the dog) around to tennis and football, collecting wood, shopping and repaired machinery, the vehicle gets a fair work out.

“Oh, and if you wouldn’t mind checking the demister. It doesn’t seem to be working.”

Now there’s an understatement. The weekend just past we had set out on a three hundred or so kilometre drive to see my sister. It was snowing and after five kilometres we turned back, defeated by the cold in the cabin and a fogged up windscreen.

The quote came as a shock: $500 dollars.

The trouble?

“Mice, mate.”

“Eh?”

“In your heating system. Eaten it.”

“Nah!”

“Gone through the lot.”

“But mice eat cheese, not heating systems.”

“Must’ve been hungry.”

Or cold. Did you know mice like wiring? That they’re quite partial to radiator hose? Will kill for a fan belt? No one believed me. But the butcher, bless his heart had an idea.

“G’day, Tone.”

“Kev.”

“You know those mice you were tellin’ me about?”

“Yeah.”

“How big were they, Tone?”

Well, how big would you be after dining out on half an engine, banqueting under the bonnet all night long? I didn’t articulate this line of thought. Kev looks like he might have done a bit of banqueting in his time. Come to think of it, his sausages and my radiator hose could well be distant cousins.

“Biggish, I’d say. Or perhaps there was a lot of them, Kev. There’s a mouse plague you know.”

Kev, ever the gentleman, took my meat out to the car for me. Tactfully, he asked if he could take a 'quick look' under the bonnet. He examined the disembowelled heater fan box and the shredded piping. Emilia Fox in Silent Witness could not have taken more care. He looked me in the face. Man to man.

“Rats, Tone.”

“Eh?”

“Rats. Your mouse hasn’t got teeth as big as that.”

His well-clipped fingernail moved reverently over the recently serrated rim of the fan box. He had a point. But I wish he’d kept his voice down. This is a small town, after all.

I thanked him for his concern and drove home. Aesop had never to my knowledge written fables about rats. Nothing cute or cuddly about rats, unless… Perhaps they were native? Bush Rats? Bandicoots? On the run from feral dogs and cats, seeking winter refuge - poor things - in our glove box. The kids might adopt them, teach them tricks, feed them… sausage?

Meanwhile, news had travelled. The mechanic told his wife, who told the hairdresser, who told the chemist who had already heard it from the butcher, who passed it on anyway, to the doctor, who happened to mention it to the editor of the local paper over a round of golf, who sent a photographer and cadet reporter out to my place. The next day the banner headline of The Buninyong Bugle screamed: “Rural Rats Wreak Ruin” with a full-frontal, bonnet-open, photo-shopped close-up of the gutted Holden.

In the face of my shame, something kept tugging at my memory, a bit like that nibbling sound you hear at night in the ceiling above your … No! I won’t go there. Rather, in an exile’s reverie, I drifted back to an idyllic English childhood, populated with lovable fictional fauna: fluffy foxes, rabbits, badgers, owls, mice, and yes … rats. Of course … Good old Ratty! Inspired, I googled him: 'sophisticated, charming and affable… a free and easy sort, as well as a dreamer (with) a poetic thought process, finding deeper meaning, beauty, and intensity in situations others may see through a more practical outlook' said Wikipedia. So, I thought, there is an alternative reading here. Rattus rattus tucking into my heating system was not driven by insatiable winter hunger, or a malevolent wish to bring humankind down; t’was but a whimsical reminder to us of a symbiotic relationship, which has stood the test of time.

“Hey,” he says, from his cosy nest in the Holden’s innards, his little pink nose quivering ever so slightly, “we’re fellow travellers, have been ever since Noah; wherever you go, we go too. So get over it.”

And I have.

I ride a bicycle now.