I’ve got good news and bad news

The bad news:

A family in Bushey Hill Road have been hit by E.coli three times in a year. The infection was probably picked up from mouse droppings. I hate mice, ever since I saw one in my kitchen. My humane principles go out of the window; I want the fuckers dead.

Speaking of vermin*, a Camberwell-based rapist has been convicted of a ten-year-old attack, at least his second such offence.

The good news:

The Camberwell SE5 photo pool is inundated with Camberwell Beauties!

Camberwell Beauties

*Look at me; I’m the next Richard Littlejohn!

Author: Peter

Long-time resident of Camberwell, author of this blog since July 2004.

58 thoughts on “I’ve got good news and bad news”

  1. i had an occasional visiting mouse this winter. i eventually tracked him down on one of his foraging trips hiding behind my christmas tree. i then chased him down and despatched him with a couple of hefty whacks with a squeegee mop. did the trick.

    i would love to be able to claim to be a mouse-hunter extraordinaire. however, with humane traps not seeming to have fooled him i had put down some poison. the mouse seemed very unstable and repeatedly jumped in the air for no apparent reason and was no match for my lumbering speed. i think i may have half-way disabled him with green pellets. non of the glory is mine.

    i love animals on the whole. but mice just pee everywhere they go and nibble your food. no-one pees on my breakfast cereals without feeling the sharp side of my squeegee.

  2. I found the good old-fashioned mouse trap did the trick. Got two of the buggers, and wounded one more. Now I have sonic repellents in use, and haven’t seen the scum since.

  3. we found that getting a cat has been the best solution in terms of preventing mice and has other benefits too!

  4. According to Ecolab, Southwark’s pest control contractor, a stunning 70%(!!!!) of all HYGIENE related pest-control problems in Southwark originate in Camberwell. At least this is what we were told at a presentation at the Camberwell East Area Forum meeting. I find this a bit hard to believe myself, but it does seem we have mice because we are dirty…

  5. You’d have to be meticulously fastidious to keep them out once they join you. A pair of mice can have 15,000 descendants within a year. They run through the terraces, especially through the roofs. The name mouse comes from Sanskrit for thief. They are incontinent and pee as they run. The pee is fluorescent. They crawl through the tiniest gaps, so you have to eradicate the gaps and close all your inside doors at night so they don’t run from room to room. They can fall 12 feet and be OK. They can leap 12 inches. Their teeth are harder than nails and never stop growing — if they have nothing to gnaw on (lab tests show) their teeth can grow up to 5 inches.

    We’ve tried to lot — poison, traps, sonics — but not yet a cat. Just the smell of a cat is enough, they say.

  6. the huge amount of rubbish on the streets doesn’t help. nor the ‘lets just chuck chicken bones n shit on the pavement’ attitude many seem to have. nor all the empty properties. vermin heaven.

    i’d love to have a cat, but don’t really believe in keeping one solely indoors. i will have to wait until i have a place with a garden — and that, unfortunately, is unlikely to be in camberwell at current prices.

    however, since my vicious vermin killing spree, word of my squeegee prowess has spread amongst the critters and they’ve stayed away.

    MFin’ Mouse Killa me

  7. apparently if you borrow a cat for a week the mice will stay away for a year.

    the first time i saw my furry lodger he was trying to gnaw through the base of an internal fire (but not mouse-) resistant door. and was being fairly sucessful as the inch long hole demonstrates.

    I put on a skirt and slippers and ran around shouting ‘Thomas!’ but it didn’t seem to do the trick

  8. Speaking of Bushey Hill Road, does anyone know anything about the development (mews houses, apparently) at 5A BHRd? There used to be a garage there or something. The access is a narrow driveway off BHRd, but the diggers are also using the driveway of the house I live in on Peckham Road. I’m hoping this is a temporary access way, but I haven’t been able to learn much from the planning application details on Southwark’s website. Anyone know anything, or at least advise on how I can go about finding out more?

    Wouldn’t it be lovely if SE5 were suddenly inundated with real Camberwell Beauties, rather then with virtual ones? Would be far better than being inundated with mice.

  9. Regarding the leisure centre, is it open again?
    I tried to swim there a week ago and it was closed because of worries regarding the roof falling in or something.

  10. I’ve an orrible feeling they’re trying to stealth close the leisure centre… the wonderful staff there are distraught as they haven’t been told anything other than “the council are looking into it” and can’t give anyone dates or more info…

    currently no date has been discussed, but everything is shut for health and safety reasons.. still, 5 a side in Ruskin Park works out fine!

  11. Closed due to wind damage to roof a couple of weeks ago (my son is a swimmer). Lots on the long term deal over on the se5 forum site and I think some sort of campaign is forming.

  12. I must express absolute outrage at the anti-mouse propaganda that so many of you have posted above. We do not pee as we walk — we prefer a quiet, private, relaxed environment — much like you mono-sapiens. Our teeth grow, yes, but if they grew as fast as some of you claim, how would I be able to see the keyboard in order to type this posting? Answer that!
    And as to the allegations that a single pair of meeces can produce 15,000 progeny in a year — might I remind you that it is mono-sapiens that have increased their number on this small planet from 2 billion 100 years ago to 6.5 billion today! So if I poo on your lino, I apologise — pardon me for the small inconvenience while you f**k up the planet!
    Yours disgustedly,
    Mushtimeecta.

  13. One positive point about mice infestations… at least it means you dont have rats! Allegedly mice do not live in the same place as rats. (That helps me tolerate the mice in our house anyway…)

  14. We had mice last year and they were very wily, poo-pooing the peanut butter, chocolate and cheese (as suggested on the packaging) in our good old-fashioned mouse traps. So out came the poison and, luckily, they didn’t snuff it in our flat or I am sure I would have smelt their decaying carcasses. Mice are disgusting, but again it doesn’t surprise me when I see all our scabby neighbours leave their rubbish next to the wheelie bins (how hard is it to put it in the bin!!) so the foxes and mice can nibble their way through to eat decaying food.

    I had one of those growing lettuces in the kitchen when the mice were in residence and we had guests staying. One morning most of the lettuce had been nibbled away – so you see mice don’t like junk food like choc, cheese and peanut butter.

    Also, I was trading mouse stories with a friend. he had a resident mouse who was partial to some nori seaweed he had in the cupboard. He decided to go down the posion route with mr mousey and the mouse took the bait…only to crawl out into the kitchen and die while my friend had guests round for dinner – luckily they had already eaten…

  15. The 70% statistic is too big to take in, Eva. It may be that the highrise flats in Walworth and Peckham are no place for mice. There must be a local mousetorian who knows. But if you have a mouse phobia, for instance, there is nothing worse than seeing one shoot across the floor; or hearing them rattle across a plasterboard ceiling at night like a coronation coach and 12 horses, or gnawing loudly at plaster, wood or metal with that demented nothing-gets-in-my-way menace they have.

    The bombs shifted ’em, I bet! There are few mice in Burgess Park!

  16. Don’t foxes eat mice? We have loads of foxes in our area, if I ever see a mouse again I may tempt a fox in to eat it.

    Last week two foxes made love in the street directly in front of my house, at 8.30 in the evening, as bold as you like. It was over very quickly; perhaps that’s why vixens make that complaining noise.

  17. I live in a flat which has a communnal garden at the front so it’s great because all the cats in the neighbourhood frequent it (a la Top Cat and Buddies!) and scare away any horrid mice and other ephemera…which is nice

  18. What do any professional gamblers in the area make of the supercasino going to Manchester not Greenwich? There could’ve been a knock-on effect in Camberwell. Regeneration through degeneration.

  19. I quite often saw rats in Camberwell when I first moved into the area around 12 years ago. In fact, one sat on our bay window (outside) and watched us as we ate — a bit creepy.

    But (touching wood), I haven’t seen a rat near where I live for ages now. We get brave mice in our garden — brave because we have two cats. And we get foxes roaming bold as brass from garden to garden in broad daylight. They even come to my back door and face off against my kittens through the glass, which I find amusing.

    Maybe its true that rats won’t be around where there are mice. Does the same go for foxes? Are rats scared of foxes??

    Actually, in the past couple of years I have also seen less and less gray squirrels too in my garden and in the park behind it. Is the animal kingdom of Camberwell changing??

  20. @Bukowski333 — my apologies for the delay in replying. I’ve been pooing & peeing solidly for 24 hours — I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I did have a gnaw on some solid green stuff in a little wooden box last night, just after my last posting, and it’s given me the runs terrible! I only just got out of the box before the door came thundering down — phew, it was very close!
    Yes, I am a mouse and proud of it. When others ask “are you a man or a mouse”, I proudly step forward to claim the latter. Wanna make something of it?

  21. @Eva — as far as Ecolab’s statistics go, I’d take those with a pinch of salt (& a little bit of cheese on the side, in my case!) They have a vested interest in talking up their favourite subject, which, unsurprisingly, is pest control. The day they say that the pest problem in Southwark is under control, all the turkeys in Norfolk will proudly declare that they think Christmas is a damned good idea. I bet if you went to Bermondsey Neighbourhood Forum, they would be ranting on about how the proximity of the river means that 90% of Southwark’s “pests” (I use the term advisedly, given my species) are in Bermondsey.
    My paws are getting tired with all this walking across the keyboard, so I must retire ( for a pee and a poo).

  22. I’ve seen the occasional mouse dart about in the flat, but i rcon they’ve been passing through rather than in residence. i hope…

    When mrs squidder lived in hackney there were LOADS of mice in her house, and it was a problem because they’d got so confident they’d just be running across the table when you were trying to cook etc. horrid! but one day they just seemed to vanish. “how nice, but where have they gone?” everyone wondered… The answer became clear when a HUGE rat was spotted in the kitchen! The rats had either scared the mice off, or eaten them!

    So, after a controlled burst of mass panic the exterminator was called. We knew that it’d worked cos about a week or so after his visit the house was FULL of Huge. Black. Flies. It was like that scene from the Amityville Horror!

    So the flies were all despatched and life continued vermin free for about 4 months…

    …Until one of the housemates was going away, and went to use his big rucksack that he used day to day as his dirty laundry bag. Pulling out a couple of layers of dirty socks he was “surprised” to find he had grabbed a handful of fur and bones! One of the rats had obviously chosen his laundry bag as its final resting place and had lain there quietly rotting away for months in silent revenge!

    YIKES!

  23. The recent posts have really highlighted how similar everyone is with their crp tellys, bikes and organic food boxes.

    The blog is descending into I like this, me too, i like that, me too.

    It’s boring.

    How about who did you vote for in the last general election and what is your annual salary/earnings?

  24. Why not let people gamble when and where they want?

    You can lose all you money at Ladbrokes so why not in the Dome, in Blackpool and in Manchester.

  25. The country with the highest levels of personal debt in Europe is about to enter a new era of supercasinos. What could possibly go wrong?

  26. You can buy a gun if you know where. So why not let people buy them where and when they want?

  27. Aha, we’re nit-picking in the moral maze…

    You can buy crack if you know where. So why not let people buy it where and when they want?

  28. I agree. All drugs should be decriminalised to remove the profit motive from dealing and eradicate drug related organised crime.

    As you say anyone who wants crack can get it so what good is making it illegal?

  29. I like this, me too, I like that, me too, moo! I voted Labour in the last election, I always do because I am aconservative. My annual earnings are currently nil.

    I found a copy of the Sun this week and have been reading in it. The sport is still good. But there was an article about a “rat-faced” paedophile driving a school bus or something. Why oh why?

  30. didn’t vote
    9K too! God, my tax return was a drag this year. I went to the tax office to sort out all Her Majesty’s mistakes and realised that the people working there have NO IDEA! Check what tax you’re paying because they make a lot of mistakes. Mine’s a very long story which I’ve decided to spare you (I didn’t spare those closer to me) but suffice it to say mucho tax cockups à la state.

  31. I think it’s bizarre that Manchester got the supercasino. I would have thought Blackpool was the better choice in terms of the regeneration the casino would bring to the area. And let’s face it, Blackpool is that kinda town already.

    Manchester — already had a hack of a lot of investment from all kinds of bodies.

    The Dome — surely the whole area is going to be pimped out for the Olympics anyway.

    Having siad all that I don’t have all the facts so I’m making a top line sort of observation.

    As far as the wider debate on gambling goes — it’s obviously a social evil in some respects, addictive, takes money from those least able to avoid it etc etc. But. If you’re idiot enough to gamble in the first place (sorry Alan) then you gotta face the consequences. It’s not like drugs where lots of pressures (peer pressure for instance) can get people into the scene. There is no real pressure to gamble. Is there?

  32. No need to apologise- I agree with you. I wouldn’t gamble in the way you mention.

    Saying that I am going to Vegas for a stag weekend at the end of April and I will probably gamble and lose that weekend but I blame that on peer pressure rather than idiocy.

    If only there was a Vegas style resort a bit closer then we could save on carbon…

    Patio- love the crack jokes keep ’em coming…

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