Roddy makes a pile

You could view it as morphic resonance. The previous evening we had watched Ratatouille on DVD, with its hero Remy, the skilled and creative chef. Then we saw Roddy, looking for all the world the gastronomic connoisseur, sifting through the detritus of fruit and veg on our compost heap, as cool as cool could be. We still had Pusskin at the time, but the old boy wasn’t up to chasing a rat he couldn’t see! Roddy slipped off with the odd bit of orange and lettuce, obviously putting together a neat little salad for his mates. It is said that there is a rat for every one of us on this sceptered isle, so it’s no great surprise to see one. Of course, he is Rattus Norvegica, the brown rat, not Rattus Rattus, the black rat. The good news is he doesn’t carry bubonic plague (that’s the job of the black rat), though you wouldn’t want him to join you for dinner.

Time passed and we didn’t see him again. Then, succumbing to the zeitgeist, we thought we’d make a tiny veggie plot, a neat little raised bed to grow some diverse salad stuff. Now the thing with compost heaps is you know they have composted some great stuff down at the bottom of the pile (thank you, worms), but it’s a nightmare to ever get it out. We thought we’d have a go for our new bed.

Our heap turned out to have three distinct macroscopic layers. The top third is the recent stuff you can still recognise, in the process of digestion by a million zillion tiny worms. The next layer has been colonised by some of the local plants who have realised this is a rich resource – it’s a matted bed of live roots. Finally, the bottom third is lovely rich compost. So we excavated a hole in the bottom third of our heap, with the second layer holding up the top layer. Quick as a flash, when our backs were turned, Roddy moved in, excavating a pile more compost in the process! Why live in a burrow underground when you can live above ground and below a food shop? The picture shows him sampling a veggie stalk of some sort that he has just heaved off the compost heap. He’s quite a big chap, or maybe lass.

Now, by and large, I view him as a squirrel without a bushy tail. But I wouldn’t invite a squirrel (well, except Squirrel) to lunch, nor a hedgehog, so he is in good company. And I don’t really want him in my compost heap and, in reality, it will soon collapse in on the hole I made by natural processes involving gravity and rain, so it’s a dumb site anyway. The real problem is that he might be a she, and they breed like, errm, rabbits! So, now the compost heap is an isolation ward – no new food prep offshoots, lots of water, some miserable indigestible grass cuttings. I think Roddy might be getting the hint. I’ll bet Pusskin kept them under control when this was part of his feral patch before he went blind.