Someone called the council about the rats. I can’t remember now if it was Mum or the neighbour, but someone called them. There are rats suddenly, you see. We have at least one in the garden, plus its babies. The babies are quite cute but they are still rats, actually.

I film them on my phone. Not for evidence, just because. Mum moves the bird feeder so the babies can’t climb on to it from the bush and the rats do not like that.

There have been rat babies in the garden before. Mum says two or three years ago there were a few of them and Dad took some nice photos of them with his zoom lens. She scrolls back through lots of old photos but she can’t find them now. And anyway, the rats no longer look so cute.

So the council are called and the person from the council says that it’s a national problem, actually. That all the restaurants have closed so now the rats have nowhere to eat.

No one ever thinks about the vermin.

I text my brother about it. He says that his girlfriend told him that on the coast the seagulls have nothing to eat either because no one is buying fish and chips. He says that some of the seagulls have resorted to eating the rats.

He says, So that’s one solution.

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