A mouse, a house, a human cat and a futuristic wedding in the past

What Saturdays looked like in the year 2000.

My wife and I got married in the year 2000, which was very futuristic of us. A new century, the first time ever that a year began with a digit other than 1, and the moment when all that stuff we’d been promised on Tomorrow’s World would start to land in everyday life.

We tried to hire some flying cars for the wedding but they hadn’t been invented so we went for a couple of classic old cars, driven by some classically old people. I was fast approaching 27, so no spring chicken myself, but these guys were ancient.

As it happened, 2000 turned out to be a lot like 1999 although, in what I now think was some ominous foreshadowing, the films weren’t as good.

My wife and I started living together right at the start of the century. I mean, just a couple of days into it. We weren’t getting married until September but we bought a little house at the top end of Cardiff and moved in shortly after the Manic Street Preachers ‘end of century’ concert in the aptly named Millennium Stadium.

It’s not called that anymore, but that doesn’t stop me. I still call it Jif.

Living in sin was great, although in fairness, very similar to living not in sin.

We slipped into a routine that essentially revolved around working, drinking and shopping in Asda. In the early days there was also a lot of planning for the wedding. Mostly by my wife because she’s much better at planning than I am. She’s the Hannibal in our little A Team.

I’d like to think I’m Face (Templeton Peck) - but I suspect HM Murdoch is nearer the mark.

One Saturday we were enjoying one of those lazy mornings that only exist briefly in most people’s lives. We were in our living room, eating bacon sandwiches and drinking tea and watching SM:TV, hosted by Ant and Dec and Cat Deeley.

I’m not sure if it was during Wonky Donkey, Chums, or Challenge Ant when a little mouse suddenly appeared, completely uninvited, and scurried rather quickly across the laminate floor and towards the TV (despite, as I’ve just mentioned, there being a Cat on said telly).

My wife and I looked at each other, checking that we had both seen this. We now had a situation on our hands as we had a mouse in our house and not much of an idea regarding what to do about it. We had the board game Mousetrap upstairs, but like everyone who owned that game, we’d never actually played it.

So we were going into this challenge somewhat wet behind the ears.

Do you remember how Dec used to go bananas at kids who got the rules to Wonky Donkey wrong? Good times.

I went over to the TV stand and glanced down at the spaghetti-style tangle of leads at the back, but I could see no mouse. I gently nudged the stand with my foot. Nothing. I nudged it again, with a little more force.

The mouse shot out from under the stand, across the floor and out into the kitchen. This was bad because that’s where all our cheese lived.

I went into the kitchen, but no mouse could be seen. I checked the fridge. Cheese was unbreached and there were no tiny footprints in the butter, thankfully.

My wife joined me in the mouse hunt.

“I think it might be under the fridge,” I said, although I had nothing to base this opinion on.

As it happened, I was right. Although quite a bit of time elapsed between my statement and verification of the fact. SM:TV had finished and CD:UK was now on.

And it’s literally just occurred to me, while writing this, that Cat Deeley hosted CD:UK and her initials are CD. How did I not notice that at the time?

Anyway…

I lay down on the kitchen floor and had a look, but it was dark and dusty and in truth I was sort of keeping my distance as I didn’t want the mouse to run into my face - so I couldn’t see anything. Eventually the mouse simply appeared from under there, presumably out of boredom - there was really not much to do under the fridge (one of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers lesser known songs).

We made eye contact and the mouse once again made a run for it, this time towards the back door, which was closed. My elation at being right about where the mouse was hiding had all but evaporated as the mouse, panicking almost as much as me, ran back to the relative safety of the underside of our fridge.

We resolved to find a way to coax it out, first from under the fridge and then out into the garden (from whence it came, as the elves like to say in Lord of the Rings).

Would cheese really work as a bit of mouse bait? We only had Tom and Jerry cartoons to go on and, frankly, Tom’s success rate did not suggest he was the right role-model for the task.

In the end we opted for a long narrow stick from the garden, which I used to prod around a bit, to get the mouse moving. And you know what?

It worked.

The mouse scampered out and made straight for the door (now open) onto the small bit of patio, across the lawn and into the big trees at the back of the garden.

It never returned.

I like to think he or she is somewhere else, writing an alternative view of this little memoir to an audience of rapt rodent readers on his or her own mouse blog.

It’s equally likely that it was immediately scooped up by a cat (not Deeley) and presented as a grisly gift to its owner in one of the other houses on the estate.

Because nature is bloody rough like that.

We got married in the September, which was a rather joyous way to start a new century.

And while I’m sure some smartarses will say that it wasn’t a new century at all, but the very end of the last one, know this… I don’t care. It started with a 2, so that made it different.

There’s neither moral nor meaning to this story but sometimes I think that’s OK.

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