I should probably have taken it as a damning indictment of my twenty-seven years on this planet when I found myself spending my birthday staring blankly at the small piece of cake I had placed on the floor for the mouse. In retrospect trying to include the mouse in the ‘celebrations’ was both overly ambitious and also highly flawed. The mouse did, admittedly, come out to examine the cake. Unfortunately then the rest of the mice came out and a fight ensued. The original mouse walked away looking stunned and violated and the others formed a raging pile of avarice and hate.
 
 Once again I had somehow become the bastard. I had also become somewhat aware that there is some magical mouse-portal into my flat. I should have just hoovered them up right there and then in a distressing Dyson-splattering whirlwind of gore and tiny, adorable feet. However, I am a pussy and a lazy man and thus I just watched them and thought how touching it would be if they all lined up and squeaked Happy Birthday to me.

 They didn’t. No, they rolled and fought and shat and probably pissed because, really, the world is not that whimsical and mice are just out to fuck up my day. Despite of the recent mouse-purge exiling a dozen of the little fuckers to the gulag of the outside world I still keep seeing them ricochet around my floor like disease-carrying pinballs. There is no possible way I could have that many mice in the house… they would be exploding out of every cupboard and being found poking comically out of the toaster.
 
 I would call the council and have them unleash the exterminators but that would merely change my problem from one of live mice to one of poisoned dead mice going off and smelling. A live mouse may have its downsides but it is at least a lot cuter than a small bloated corpse finally exploding one day… especially as a live mouse tends to run away and hide and so is, in essence, self-tidying.

 I have tried to apply lateral thinking to the situation. I have tried to imagine a sweeping herd of mice gliding across the floor in formation gobbling up crumbs, dusting with their stomach fur and generally acting like an organic automated cleaning system. I have also tried to pretend that they are pets and perhaps friends. In my experience both pets and friends often try to shit on the carpet when you’re not looking but in general they tend to spend slightly less time fucking in the cupboards in an attempt to create an unstoppable army of warriors.

 The outside world does seem to chiefly suggest a full-scale mouse pogrom of some kind. People have told me to get a cat. This seems a flawed solution when the vast majority of cats either attempt to kill me or blind me. The small number of non-violent cats I have come across seem to be the exception and even they would, when exposed to my random insomnia, chain-smoking and tendency to fall over anything more than an inch high, eventually become a schizophrenic timebomb. It is also likely the bloody animal would live longer than me and I’d have to write a more complex will than ‘fuck you all’ written on a piece of scrap paper along with a doodle of a duck.

 A cat would actually make my life more stressful and would probably make my house smell of catshit. The mice look after themselves while a cat, while theoretically vaguely self-sufficient, would eventually decide it merited a higher place on the food chain than me. While I, morally, couldn’t eat a cat I have my severe doubts as to whether the feeling would be reciprocated when I enjoy one of my regular unplanned short-haul flights to the place I like to call “Hardfuckingfloorland.”

 When I was younger I had a puppy. When I would fall over or down things she would sit patiently beside my head. Occasionally she would take to licking my eyeballs as I lay there in a dazed state. I never found it entirely helpful to feel the small pink tongue flicking enthusiastically across my corneas but it was in some way slightly soothing. I wouldn’t feel quite so soothed if something resourceful was doing the licking. I was always comfortingly aware that the dog wanted me to get up to give it bread. There was no way in hell the dog was going capable of holding my eyelids open with one paw and levering out my eyeball with the other. The dog was barely capable of telling when the door was open before walking through it, let alone complex surgery. I believe any cat I owned would be waiting to give me an epidural the moment I got in range and would then slowly butcher me at its leisure.
 
 The overall point of this is simple: Never share cake with anyone as you’ll only fucking regret it.