vendredi 22 août 2008

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.

13 commentaires:

aims a dit…

Sweetie - you do have quite the life!

travelling, but not in love a dit…

Aims, it really does verge on the ridiculous sometimes!

Louise a dit…

Holy Cow! (Or should it be Holy Hamster!) You can't make this stuff up. I can't believe all the little creatures lived through that ordeal. You need to become a photographer because pictures to go along with these stories would be beyond belief.

travelling, but not in love a dit…

Louise, because it also happened in the middle of the night, after a few beers it seemed almost dreamlike.

I woke up the next day thinking 'did that really happen..?'

Crazy.

Anonyme a dit…

OMG, hillarious! Ta for the laff!

travelling, but not in love a dit…

Rob, you're welcome.

Anonyme a dit…

LOVE that story :-)

Anonyme a dit…

Oh no! Poor little things...

Swearing Mother a dit…

Being a hospital worker, I've heard of vacuum cleaners being used for some very odd things, but that is the most weird.

Daryl a dit…

OH. MY. BOB. That is hysterical .. poor hamsters .. poor hangover havers .. a truly fabulous post, you should enter the blog Camera Critters .. TBNIL!

:-Daryl

Megan McGurk a dit…

Cute.
We had them when I was a kid and when the one gave birth I remember we had to cover the cage up because she kept killing the babies.

travelling, but not in love a dit…

Conortje, I know you do...you're anyone's for a hamster tale.

Marjolein - and poor me for having to get up and deal with it all in the middle of the night!

Sweary - I can only imagine the other uses....

travelling, but not in love a dit…

Daryl, I have to admit to mainly feeling sorry for myself!

Medbh - that happened to mine too when I was a boy. horrible!