I’m home again home again jiggidy jig. Long old drive but podcasts make it go away. Million Dollar Lover, still on Intrigue with BBC SOUNDS. Back to catland and it’s warm here on my bed with the blanket on. Lou is still in Brecon. I miss it and her.
Pretty much every time I left the little house I was in someone engaged me in conversation. There’s interest in the place and I can feel why, it is a beautifully done holiday cottage now. But it is on a flight of steps that gives a useful shortcut. It’s busy. When I was recording my tape, people often lingered, seeing me in the window, curious.
It was derelict for some years, it transpires. The previous owner lived alone there until he was old, and kept ferrets. You sometimes still hear people on the way up say things like: “careful, the old man lives there, mustn’t let him see you”. I remember there were “haunted” houses and such when I was a kid and you had to hold your breath as you passed or pinch your nose or mutter something to protect you. This old guy with his ferrets clearly made an impression both positive and negative on the locals. He’s gone now and the likes of us have moved in, to buy our packs of artisan coffee on the high street and noisily record things in front of a tripod in the living room for a couple of hours on a Tuesday.
I wonder if he was the dynastic cathedral family ferreter, pre rentokil, keeping his working ferrets against the time they got called in for a rat infestation: “they’ll realise what they done wrong and call for us again darlings, just you wait, all these folk they don’t know that all that nasty poison, that ain’t the best way to get those rats anyway, they’re clever and that’s expensive and nasty that is, but us darlings? We’re cleverer then they aren’t we darlings? We’ll be like the pied piper won’t we? Begging us they’ll be, as the rats eat their lemon drizzle cake. And you’ll go in those holes and it’ll be like old days again and oh just think of darlings, just you wait…”
“They like to hide up trouser legs,” Lou remarked from apocryphal memory, and yes, I too have that memory. I wonder if anyone who wasn’t there a bit in the seventies has any memory of that. I wonder if anyone who was doesn’t. Ferretlegging in the country pub… how long can you keep the ferret in your trousers? Ferret racing. The guy with a beret on and a ferret in his pocket… A strange old world of familiar furry predators. And for thousands of years, maybe until they just got too hard to find, the ferret man was your solution for rats. Maybe until poison was everywhere and you can’t trust the client to be honest when you ask them “are they poisoned?” and you lose a ferret for eating bad rat. It’s not really a vocation you see these days. Anyone who has had rats, did you look for a ferret man? It’s smart, you know. A good ferret will even bring up all the bodies and then you don’t have weeks of horrible stink. I’m sure they still exist and I’ve just forgotten them being in London.
This old brecon ferret house is glorious now, with the most enviable bathroom I have ever sluiced myself in. A huge freestanding bath, an excellent shower, plenty of light but nobody looking in. Lou is like a ferret at finding good deals on accomodation. I’ve long ago realised she’s better and more persistent than I am. I had to come back to London to troubleshoot ahead of a live tester for an ongoing event tomorrow. But I wish I was going to sleep in the ferret house.
AlBarclay 