Seachain an duine a bhíonn ina thost

I'm feeling a little .. delicate today having attended the AU Dinner last night. I like the AU Dinner -- it's formal but not as formal as the ball so you get all sorts of lovely summery dresses. I wander around all night coveting all the lovely clothes.

So today I have been taking it easy. I've drunk a litre of Innocent Pomegranates, Blueberries & Acai natural detox stuff and half a litre of orange juice, eaten a large bacon and black pudding sandwich and gone for a wander down to the Stone Circle (aka Narnia) in the sunshine.

Now I'm sitting in my spick and span bedroom with no rat or mouse droppings in sight, no strange odours and I'm feeling quite calm. I think the infestation is well and truly over. Now I just need Derek the Mouseman to come take away the poison -- it does give off a strange chemical-y smell.

Gosh I'm feeling tense now. I've just had my first driving lesson. It was reasonably fun actually; the man is very very nice and he took me to Parc Menai so I could drive around without there being traffic lights and scary things.

The damn place is full of learner drivers though; I'm not sure what scares me more, other learners or real traffic. We're just so unpredictable.

He says I'm good at steering and changing gears. Perhaps not so much at, say, starting the car, not panicking, that kind of thing. But I suppose steering and changing gears are the important ones when you're driving.

This is the drawer where I keep my pyjamas. That's my Lyric FM t-shirt.

Right, I've cleaned under and around the piano, I've mopped many areas, I've used the Dettol wipes and I've trekked up to Morrisons to get more black sacks. Only two more places the bastard can hide: under the drawers beside my bed or under the shelves just inside my door.

I don't know if I'm going to be able to check under the drawers myself -- it takes a whole person to lift them (and they have to be lifted, being wedged in a corner) so I'll need a second person to look underneath. But the shelves will be easy because they're slatted so all I need to do is lift a few things up.

But it's becoming increasingly likely that there simply is no mouse in my room anymore.

Which is nice.

Definitely making progress: cleared under the bed, the fireplace, the drawers and the wardrobe. The worst is over. I am getting out my Dettol multi-action 4-in-1 and starting to scrub.

Still no dead mouse ...

Good news: no mice in my clothes. At least, not anymore. There are droppings in the bottom of the wardrobe but not in or around my clothes.

I did have to throw away my Lyric FM t-shirt though; it appears to have been used as a nest. It was covered in poo and pee-stains. It was in the drawer beside my bed ...

Tomorrow will be a long day. I have to get two trains to Dublin, a Luas (tram) to near my gran's house, she'll drive me the rest of the way. Then I have to get another Luas back into the centre of Dublin and a DART (train) to Dun Laoghaire. Then obviously a ferry to Holyhead and a train to Bangor.

This means I've been on just about every mode of transport imaginable in the last few days. I was driven to Manchester Airport, flew to Shannon (passing Bangor on our way -- I waved), and was driven home. We spent Saturday traveling from Dublin to Naas by narrowboat and went to our barge on Sunday.

So that's car, train, plane, tram, DART and three types of boat.

I have charged my mp3 player and chosen several books in preparation for the journey.

I have the most amazing Easter egg in the world. It's a big flat oval slab of chocolate weighing over a kilo. You have to carve bits off with a big knife if you want to eat it. This will keep me going for months. Perhaps I'll make brownies with some of it.

Derek The Mouseman has paid his second visit. He found that the poison just beside my wardrobe has been eaten, but couldn't find a corresponding dead mouse. This is also a little traumatic; has a mouse nuzzled up into my ball dress to die? Is it curled up in the sleeve of one of my jumpers? Will I detect its presence by smell alone or will I put my leg into my trousers and find it falling out the bottom?

I rather daringly spent last weekend in the Lake District climbing up mountains. The weather was sublime -- sunny enough to be warm in just a base layer but breezy enough to be refreshing -- and the views were wonderful, if a little hazy. I've got quite a lot of pictures, so brace yourselves.

The first day we went up Cat Bells, right along and then back down through the valley. It was luverly.



We came across this lovely waterfall which had beautifully cool water which tasted like snow:



The food was absolutely fantastic, like this giant piece of beef:





And now I'm being dragged away to go catch a flight. Farewell, adieu, I'll put up more photos after Easter.

This week I have struggled with the revelation that there is a mouse/are mice in my room.

I had never realised I was afraid of mice before, presumably because I'd never been woken up at 5:45 by the sound of a mouse gnawing at my bedroom door from the inside. Mice in cages are fine, mice at a distance, running freely in some meadow somewhere, that's all fine. But mice in my bedroom is a big no-no.

So that was Tuesday, waking up bright and early. I had to wake up nice and early to go to NUS National Conference anyway, so I laid some (humane) traps, opened my bedroom door and hoped for the best. Didn't seem much point phoning my landlady since she wouldn't have done anything more than that.

But when I got back and examined my room again on Friday, I found the floor covered in mouse droppings. The piano covered in mouse droppings and gnawed. Mouse droppings in the drawer beside my bed. Mouse droppings on top of my bedside cabinet. And (this was one of those real-life nightmare moments) my pyjamas, on the edge of my bed, completely shredded.

There was a mouse. Beside. My pillow.

So that's it. I'm not staying in my room again until the mice (probably plural at this stage, particularly since droppings have since been found elsewhere in the house) are gone. The traps weren't working, there was evidence that the population had expanded, it was time to get pest control in. I phoned my landlady who said she'd call Rentokil in the morning. She called Rentokil, then told me she wasn't going to ask them to come to the house until Monday because it was too expensive to call them out at the weekend.

This annoyed me quite a bit. If it was her property being damaged and pooed all over she'd have them out in a jiffy. And she tried to tell me I hadn't told her soon enough, when she'd first been informed of the mouse problem two weeks earlier (one had been spotted but then vanished again). So I've stumped up the difference between calling someone out at the weekend and on a weekday.

Sam tells me Derek The Mouse Man was very nice and extremely interesting. He's laid two types of poison and will be coming back twice more to clear it up. Apparently mice are neophobic, so if you lay a trap it takes at least two days before they'll pluck up the courage to approach it. And rats can climb up to 13 feet. Psycho has also just told me that mice can squeeze through gaps the size of a penny and sometimes even a biro. Doesn't that make you feel safe in your beds?

So now I'm taking precautions. I've got a can of expanding foam to fill in all gaps with, I'm going to insist that no crumbs remain on the floor and I've got a big pack of Dettol anti-bacterial wipes and some 4-in-1 spray to clean my room top to toe. But I'm still not going back until they're all gone.