Dreadful Nonsense

As we are free-thinking, upstanding, righteous and worthy citizens we (actually, only He Who Only…) decided (decreed) that we shouldn’t spend our Sunday afternoon dribbling, lying on the sofa eating sweets and watching the live streaming of Big Brother trying to work out what swears they were saying (which is what I wanted to do), and that we should instead leave the flat, go into London City Town Place and visit the Museum of London to get us some edjukayshun.

Objecting wildly with flapping of hands, and threatening a dirty and nudey protest, I was nevertheless put on a bendy bus and brought into the City Where None Of The People Are of a Sunday. I blinking love London City at the weekends, if you manage to avoid all the normal tourist lumps and keep very much to the working man’s path. You can go for streets on end and not encounter a single person or car, and it’s especially true if, like last Sunday, it’s absolutely appalling down with rain.

We were cruising at a fine speed heading towards Barbican when I spied some sort of excitement happening on the street beside us. A man was half crouching and half running along the path pointing his camera phone towards the ground. In front of him was running the biggest rat I have ever seen in my entire lifetime. It was about the size of quite a large squirrel, which I think you’ll agree is absolutely not the size a rat should be. Gimp Boy with the mobile was trying to video it, as he obviously agreed with me that it was a freakishly nuclear sized rat. He crouched/chased it towards two people, a man and a woman, who were standing in a shop doorway.

The rat, obviously by this stage greatly disturbed, started to jump up at the window of the shop, trying to get in through the glass to what it thought was safety, which gave Gimp Boy time to catch up, and totally freaked out the girl who had just experienced a nuclear sized rat running through her legs. The rat quickly discovered that the glass was not a porthole to freedom and it scrabbled to turn around to keep running along the road.

At this point, boyfriend of freaked out girl took up the chase alongside Gimp Boy, but as he wasn’t encumbered with trying to film the whole thing instead took three or four quick steps towards the rat and then lashed out with his foot, kicking the poor thing into the air.

The thump of his foot as it connected with the rat was one of the more sickening sounds I’ve heard in my lifetime. It flew through the air like a football, thudded on to the ground about 5 feet away, bounced, and ended up in the gutter. It then twitched for - well, I don’t know how long. At that point I had my hand across my mouth and had to turn away, because I felt so utterly disgusted. He Who Only… later informed me that Git Face Boyfriend looked incredibly pleased with himself, like he’d scored the winning goal at the World Cup.

Now, I understand that rats are vermin, and carry diseases, but that kind of needless, disgusting, gratuitous kind of violence towards any living creature turns my stomach. It genuinely haunted me for the rest of the day, the sound of his foot connecting with the rat, the vision of it trying desperately to climb up the wall, the terror it must have felt being chased by an idiot with a camera phone…

Anyway. Enough of my vegetarian grandstanding. Tomorrow I will be posting photographs of some of the REALLY DISGUSTING THINGS you can see in the Museum of London. Hoorah!

This entry was posted on 22 May 2006 at 6:00 pm. 0 comments

Dreadful Nonsense

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