Rats
First let me apologise to readers in the Isle of Man, where I live. Saying the word “rat” here is considered to be so unlucky that we normally call them “long-tails”, “Rolands” or similar. However, as this blog has an international readership who might be confused by such metaphors, for the rest of this post I will lay superstition aside and call them RATS. There are (or were) rats on my allotment. How do I know? Well for a start, they ate my entire corn crop last autumn, leaving only the cobs, as you can see from this picture. I didn’t mind too much about that because, I reasoned, I could grow another corn crop next year, rats have to eat too, and maybe it was my fault for not growing more corn so there was enough for both me and the rats (the latter being an example of the victim – me - identifying with the perpetrators – the rats). But things came to a head this spring when the rats started gnawing the bark off my newly planted apple trees. I didn’t even know that rats ate