So the pest control man from the council came to my house today to address the previously mentioned mouse problem. He was a man of about fifty, with a stained t-shirt, protruding belly and a disturbing amount of bum cleavage on show. One of those middle aged men who don’t speak to women directly but instead address all communication to their boobs. He stamped around my flat, looking in all the nooks and crannies with a gigantic torch and picking up mouse poo with his BARE HANDS and sniffing it. Then he sat down to do some paperwork.
“Do you have children?” he asked.
“No” I replied, thinking he’d forgotten that he’d already asked this question whilst going through the tick boxes on his form. He’d asked it right after “Who will be paying the bill? and just before “Do you have any pets?” This time he followed it up with a different question. He raised his eyebrows, looked me up and down and said “Do you want any?”
Because I am kick-arse, feminista of the 21st century, I kneed him the gangoolies and demanded that he immediately leave my flat. No, no I didn’t. Instead I laughed nervously, turned slightly pink and quickly changed the subject. Surprisingly, this did not scare him enough to stop him enquiring whether I had a boyfriend or asking for my phone number.
I spent the rest of his visit alluding to a mythical boyfriend. I didn’t make him up, the rat catcher did. He kept asking if my boyfriend would go out and buy some poison, or remove dead mouse carcasses, or call up the number for pest control that he’d given me on the form. I nodded non-commitally and said “uh huh” in all the appropriate places. If I have to have a mythical boyfriend he is going to be the best mythical boyfriend in the whole world. I will name him Hans and he is a sensitive, poetic type who can also wrestle bears to the ground without breaking a sweat (because there are a lot of wild bears in Hull. And men named Hans.)
It should be noted that in the past nine months of singledom I have now been asked out precisely twice. Once by the rat catcher and once by an elderly, Lithuanian bus driver whilst I was trapped on his bus during a snowstorm. I am going to be alone forever aren’t I? Oh well, at least I’ve got Hans.
