My city. Mice city.

Rodents love Amsterdam.  In fact it's remarkable that your average thinking mouse would choose to live anywhere else. Centuries-old houses offer excellent prospects for an opportunistic small mammal. An extensive network of canals and bridges, a medieval garbage collection system and a focus on cheese completes the idyllic picture. Yet with outside temperatures sometimes hovering around -6^oC, you can understand why a resourceful rodent might at times seek out a cosy Dutch kitchen within which to retire between outdoor exploits.  I often do the same.

A cheese shop on every corner

Some months ago I became aware that a couple of mice had sought out the comfort of our kitchen. The most compelling evidence was an empty foil packet that had contained two hundred grams of pistachio nuts in their shell. When I found it, it contained nothing - not a nut, not a shell.  Nothing. My first thought was that De Jongens had devoured the nuts and left the empty packet (do all children do that, or only mine?). But the crudely-gnawed corner of the foil, in combination with a disconcerting amount of scatological evidence might just as well have been a giant flashing sign proclaiming "RODENT WAS HERE". My only consolation was the reassuringly tiny poohs that had been left behind; I was pretty sure I wasn't dealing with a rat or a wayward weasel. Just a brazen, rapacious, pistachio-shell eating mouse.

That's a relief then.

Because I like to stick my head in the sand, particularly when it comes to the possibility of needing to kill animals, I employed a two-pronged response.  First, I deliberately didn't say anything to Ned Nederlander about the pistachio theft, because I knew he would establish a chemical armoury that would leave the culprits vomiting their insides up under our fridge.  Second, I convinced myself that a mere one or two mice had taken up residence and that really, all things considered, no action was necessary.   I resolved to always walk into the kitchen stomping my feet, clapping my hands and singing loudly. For reasons I can no longer recall, I was reluctant to call on the services of one of the many euphemistically-named exterminators who seem to make their fortunes in this city.


I spotted the Mouse Doctor parked in our street shortly after we moved in.
I soon realised he wasn't there to care for a neighbour's sick pet. 

Friends suggested that a couple of mouse traps would do the trick. Alas the sound of a tripped spring snapping shut on a small mammalian neck during the night was not something that would give me any satisfaction. On the contrary, it would force me to confront some long-buried childhood memories.

When I was seven, my family moved to a remote area in rural Australia. Our arrival coincided with a mouse plague of biblical proportions.  Most of the annual wheat harvest was eaten by mice well before the harvesters could get to it. My family didn't actually grow wheat, but we provided comfortable accommodation for the fat, happy, fecund rodents who feasted on it that year. I have a memory of my seven year old self opening a cupboard, the bottom of which was a seething square metre of brown fur. I have another memory of shutting that cupboard again quickly and running outside. My mother remembers my brothers, aged five and three, playing with toy cars in a pile of dirt and gravel that we grandly called "the sand pit". As mice scurried around them, one occasionally ran up a youthful shirt sleeve. De Broers, who must have simply figured that mice were a part of life, allegedly shook them out and continued with their game. Even today, my mother looks invincibly triumphant when recounting the time the washing machine hose dispatched several dozen drowned mice into the laundry tub. It seems they had taken shelter in the hose overnight, unaware that the morning would bring a frenzy of washing activity.

Mouse traps were thus an unpleasant fixture in my life for those couple of years. The principal legacy of that time is an unshakeable image of my parents disposing of still-twitching rodents each morning. That, and an enduring phobia of having my fingers cruelly crippled. So how likely do you think it was that I would use mouse traps in my Lowlands Pestilence Response Strategy?

Not very.

Somewhat hopefully, I turned to the internet to better understand my options. Not surprisingly, my choice of search terms - "humane mouse management" - yielded few results. Removing the word "humane" introduced me to the gruesome concept of glue traps. I can accept the use of a sticky trap as a blow-fly management tool in rural Australia, but I am not happy about them being used for anything with fur. The prospect of needing to deal with a sticky board containing an immobilised live mouse so desperate to escape that it has attempted to gnaw off its own limbs is a deal breaker for me. Tom and Jerry meets The Godfather. It holds absolutely no appeal for a woman who cried in Stuart Little.

I am embarrassed to admit that I soon gave names to "my" mice.  Because they obviously lived in a complex maze of tunnels behind the cupboards, because they stored up treasures for the afterlife (principally pistachios), but mostly because they really, really annoyed the mummies, I called them Toot and Carmen.

Such thoughts of ancient Egyptians, and a recollection that they deified cats gave me another idea. I am not a fan of cats at all, but I like them more than mice so I stopped shoo-ing the neighbourhood cats out of our garden. I even tolerated the big fluffy ginger one sitting brazenly on my kitchen windowsill, hopeful that he might persuade Toot and Carmen to seek other lodgings. Kind of like Snowbell, the big old mean cat in Stuart Little.

Meanwhile, I learned that mice are almost blind, as suggested by that well-known nursery rhyme. To compensate for this disability, they urinate every twenty centimetres or so to mark where they have been. Without this "odour map" of their surroundings, they become disorientated and forget where the lucrative cupboards are. Good to know. Furthermore, I reasoned that if they can't smell any food (because the floors are spotless and the pistachio supply is now kept in a locked safe), they might just decamp to my unsuspecting neighbours' house. My Lowlands Pestilence Response Strategy was coming into sharper focus. 

For weeks afterwards, kitchen cupboards, drawers and shelves were scrupulously disinfected on a daily basis. The floor was mopped more frequently than ever before. Mouse urine be gone. A bread bin was purchased (although a family mutiny forced me to remove the padlock and barbed wire I cannily added). Crumbs were banished hourly from all surfaces and I became more tyrannical than usual about dishes needing to be put straight into the dishwasher. I crawled for hours, inspecting skirting boards and the backs of cupboards, stuffing wads of steel wool into anything that looked like a potential mouse access point.

Shortly afterwards, either Toot or Carmen died under our fridge. I like to think she died of cleanliness. I  mentioned the related odour to Ned Nederlander and left some rubber gloves and a plastic bag under his pillow. He dealt with the situation magnificently. Such a brave man.

A month or so later, I came downstairs one morning and Kleine Jongen excitedly announced "Mum, someone left the lid of the kitchen bin open last night and there's a live mouse in there".

"So have you dealt with that, darling?" I asked hopefully.

"Yep. I closed the lid".

Displaying remarkable familial team work we courageously extracted the bin liner and deposited it in the middle of the garden. A few minutes later Ned Nederlander appeared and, on hearing the story, approached the bag with a large brick raised menacingly above his head.

"NOOOOOO!!!!!!" Kleine Jongen and I cried in unison. Ned rolled his eyes, trying to disguise his relief at our pathetic intervention. He placed the brick on the ground theatrically before skipping breezily off to the office. A couple of hours later I glanced out of our kitchen window and saw a cute, slightly ruffled mouse emerge from the bin liner and scurry confidently towards our external wall and into a tiny hole of which I had previously been unaware.

On another occasion, friends from mouse-free (but cockroach infested) Sydney were staying with us. A suspicious rustle in the kitchen caught everyone's attention one lunch time.

"I think you should know there's a mouse on your stove", the visiting dad calmly noted.

"Really?" I asked, feigning surprise.

"Yes", he assured me, feigning ambivalence.

I desperately wanted to point out that I was providing him and his family with free accommodation in one of the world's great cities, and that a single teeny mouse skipping across the stove top was hardly worth mentioning. But I was embarrassed, and didn't say anything more.

My friend probably desperately wanted to point out that although he and his family were enjoying free accommodation in one of the world's great cities, the least he expected was a basic standard of hygiene. But he was embarrassed, and didn't say anything more.

For some reason since that low point in rodent relations, (not to mention guest relations ...) there have been very few mouse sightings in our kitchen, and my faith in our Lowlands Pestilence Response Strategy is gradually growing. 

My strategy has been to counter the mice strategy with a combination of cleanliness, craftiness and compassion.

My sense is that mice sense my determination.

And for now they seem to have gone elsewhere; they've found another cosy kitchen, another cupboard with an unsecured pistachio supply, another crumb-covered benchtop, another enticing kitchen bin.

But I will remain vigilant, because I know that even though this is my city, it's mice city too.