Free Range Chickster

RAT’S TALES

I’m so busy on my south island adventure – I hardly have time to write my “opus”. I’ve got my adventures in the pool every day and my fabulous chanting yoga which moves your heart a bit; the film festival is easy here- just walk round the corner and then there is the wonderful Tami Neilson’s Kingmaker show on this week – flat out!! But I’ve also been out exploring – there is still so much to see.  I went on a driving adventure this weekend – fantastic weather - no lurking unseen black ice to terrify me and lots of beautiful places. It’s so different here- truly I feel like I am overseas – a slightly chilly France perhaps??

As I drove south, I went through the little emptying town of Clinton. It’s on the main road but a drive by for most I guess. And like lots of other small towns, it’s kind of emptied, gutted, boarded, the shop keepers shot through and the shops falling slowly. Derelict rows of them coming apart brick by brick.

 I stopped to take a photo and thought of all the lives that had gone on there, busy warm hopeful lives with cheese rolls and sloppy Red Bands and children with curly red hair squished into the ute.

As I crouched to get a better shot, right there in the daytime street, I saw, almost eye to eye a big fat slithery dark brown rat making his way out of the building. I swear he looked at me and then he was gone.

Eeek   -  too much for me   - I didn’t scream but I could have, and I was back  in my big safe car before you could say jack robinson, getting that key in the ignition and making my own getaway. Out of there - but as I started driving away from that small crumpling emptying town, with one crazy daytime rat,  co-incidentally on the afternoon radio show, Jessie Mulligan began an interview with a rat catcher from Auckland.

He described in disgusting sickening detail the massive number of rats lurking around Auckland suburbs (which he coyly refused to name). He was talking about 10, 000 rats – ye gods!

And somehow, one lonely ratty, trying to get by on the street corner in Clinton suddenly seemed benign. He’s just a chancer like all the rest of us, taking a risk, trying to survive in a changing brutal world,

So I say good luck to him (and his unseen burgeoning family)  –  but I left town fast all the same.