Suck it up

So, this one is for Conortje and appeared recently as a comment on his marvellous, funny and sometimes sartorially tragic blog. Tee hee.

Well, Conortje was talking about how he is not coping since he sacked his cleaner for putting up her prices. Mean-spirited as this may have been, it did make a funny story for us readers. Again, tee hee.

Anyway, one of the results of this sacking was that our 'hero' managed to cover his house in vacuum dust, only minutes after finishing a top-to-bottom hoovering.

This is how I ended up sharing with him my tale of rescuing five hamsters from a vacuum cleaner at 3 am.

So, the tale goes that I was staying with a friend in Cardiff - a friend who, a few months previously, had bought a pet hamster which turned out to be pregnant.

We'd had a lovely night of drinking in beautiful downtown Cardiff, followed by a bag of chips and a narrowly avoided fight in Caroline Street (those were the days). I went to bed and didn't fall asleep, so much as pass out.

I was woken at three am by the noise of the vacuum cleaner and a lot of drunken shouting, nay screaming.

Whilst we were painting the town red, the hamster and her four now-almost-fully-grown children had escaped. My drunk friend had got up for a middle of the night wee, and spotted said hamster family running down the hallway towards the kitchen, the back door and freedom….

I'm guessing that at the time this all seemed like a good idea to her. It possibly wasn't such a good move. Drunkenly, she rooted out the vaccuum cleaner (it was a model with a long hose) and cornered the hamsters.

One by one, she sucked them up.

And all this time she was berating the poor little critters (loudly and not in language that would be suitable for children) for having the audacity to escape the confines of their rotastak space station.

I awoke to find her sat on the hall floor, shouting at a vacuum cleaner, and puzzling on how to get hamsters from vacuum bag to cage…

I fished around in the dusty bag and out they popped, one after the other. Little dusty heads happy to once again be out in the fresh air. Shaken and more than slightly stirred.

The hamsters were duly returned to their plastic prison by yours truly and I went back to bed, dusty and bewildered.

I found friend the next morning, draped across the bottom stairs, hoover hose in hand. Suffice to say that there were seven hangovers in the house that day.