Declaring a truce with an unwanted guest

If you are a regular reader of my missives, you might recall some weeks ago my fond musings on the noble robin, gracing my patio, feasting on proffered morsels of bread as I sipped my morning brew. Nature and its undergrowth will stir to no man's bidding, and my targeted offerings drew more than mere avian attention.

At first, I thought it was a mysterious bird, the outlines blurred through my reading glasses. But I soon discerned the grey, sleek outline of a familiar rodent. A rat had joined our breakfast ensemble and was not shy in claiming his portions. More than entitled, over 10 minutes, he claimed the greater spoils, scurrying back and forth and gorging out of sight.

Not one for misplaced sentimentality, I issued a death warrant and that day plied traps, lures, and toxic baits. I awaited the rodent's absence as proof of his demise. I was surprised to see him return, unharmed and unabashed, again stealing the crusts after the robins retired into the hedgerows.

And so it continues for many weeks. I have rebaited, bought new traps, and contrived more tasty offerings, to no avail. The rat is either immune, very smart, or both. My contempt has morphed into a sneaking admiration as the rodent outwits my every poisoned artifice.

This morning again, there he sits, whiskers twitching, beady eyes glinting with cunning intelligence. The grey harbinger of pestilence mocks me once again, gobbling up with repulsive gusto the breadcrumbs intended for winged warblers. This rat, that embodiment of mankind's oldest revulsions, like death itself, cannot be vanquished.

Perhaps I should not be so obdurately offended by this trash-dwelling opportunist who haunts the peripheries. The rat has stalked the fringes of human society since the dawn of civilisation, shaping our stories, lingering in the shadows of our art and mythology as an inescapable reminder of the sordid realities that lurk beneath even our loftiest aspirations.

Consider the ancient Sumerians, the first great urbanists, who inscribed expressions of dismay among their earliest known writings at the revolting abundance of "tooth-bearing kibbu" infesting their granaries and rubbish heaps. These burning scribes originated the fable in which a ragged street urchin rat deviously tricks a pompous housecat into ingesting a toxin. Such was the humble rat's debut on the grand stage of literature, and its role as a sly trickster has echoed throughout the ages.

In Hindu lore, the rodent was reimagined as a stout vahana, or spiritual vehicle, for Ganesha, the elephant-headed god of beginnings and remover of obstacles. How the repulsive urban ratter, that embodiment of filth and precursor of the dreaded Black Death, came to be borne upon the whiskered muzzle of a divinity remains a theological mystery. But there it squats, globular and thick-tailed, perched next to its patron's tusk to remind the universe that the divine itself is not immaculate, that consecration and contamination are inextricably intertwined.

During Europe's morbidly pious Middle Ages, the ubiquitous vermin came to symbolise not godliness but man's perpetual brushes with sin, poverty, and eternal damnation. The Pied Piper of Hamelin is our most familiar fable depicting a rat's malign influence, with the piper's accursed melodies luring the town's pestiferous horde of rodents to doom. Less known are the grotesque 13th-century carvings in the Ely Cathedral, where rodents grinning with sharp fangs sit among the leering gargoyles and feral demons.

The Renaissance at last granted some measure of patina to the long-persecuted rat. Reawakened humanists, in rejecting monastic asceticism, boldly depicted Rattus Norvegicus (that's the Brown Rat to you and me), with an unwonted liveliness and corporeality. The Italian Old Master Caravaggio daringly portrayed the Baroque Christ Child grasping a plump rat, its hairless tail coiling from the divine infant's tender hand. And at the height of Dutch Golden Age realism, the masters festooned their canvases with lush tableaux of fruit, game, and, inevitably, the unblinking visage of some plump rodent visitor to the opulent feast - my rat's antecedent.

But just as rat populations exploded in the wake of industrialism's concrete expansion of sewers and slums, so did the vermin's role in fiction return to its previous malignancy. In literature, rats became emblems of the faceless human masses, the teeming poor, and the revolting subterranean corseting every city. Vladimir Nabokov reviled the "greyish concupiscent mus" whose squeaking violated his childhood nights in St Petersburg. H.P. Lovecraft lurked forever in the shadow of "daemon-clouds of drug-lured rats". Even the jolly Beatrix Potter stained her pages with tales of reckless and depraved rodents, while Graham Greene's gang of criminal vermin still "moved towards ill with shambling memories of poverty and cadaverous life".

No examination of the rat's role in culture would be complete without addressing the horrific symbolism employed by the Nazi regime. In their virulently anti-semitic propaganda, Hitler's ministers rendered Jewish citizens as rat-like vermin - filthy, disease-spreading parasites overrunning German society. Grotesque caricatures in Der Stürmer depicted hooked-nosed Jewish figures with rodent characteristics. At the same time, official publications like Der Ewige Jude described Jews as "parasites" to be exterminated before they could defile the Aryan racial community. Such deliberately dehumanising rhetoric facilitated the Nazis' genocide by stripping Jewish people of dignity and humanity, recasting them as expendable subhuman pests in the minds of the German public. The Holocaust's reliance on such vile propaganda reveals just how powerfully the rat's reviled image was weaponised - a chilling reminder that mankind's capacity for civilisation and barbarism remain forever intertwined.

It's no wonder Hollywood turned to the boundless fecundity of rat protagonists, granting them supernatural abilities to mirror man's darkest impulses. In Willard, the eponymous antihero wields an army of rats to murder those who have wronged him. The horror master James Herbert spun his most famous novel, The Rats, around the tale of subterraneous rodents mutating into carnivorous, quasi-intelligent beasts.

Closer to home, Damien Hurst's installations have twice rendered actual taxidermy rats, pinning them obscenely with household implements; his 2021 work The Household Rat compels its viewer to gaze unflinchingly upon the gnashing fangs and urine-stained hide of a pest that civilisation futilely strives to swat away like a recalcitrant fly on the wall. In the rat, humans find an immortal totem of pestilence, defiantly squalid and unkillable, an inexhaustible reminder that refinement, affluence, and grandeur are fleeting bubbles destined to pop.

So I sit before my unwanted vermin guest, shockingly at ease with his now familiar audacity. Just as no torrent is too formidable for rats to flourish, humanity achieves its urban sophistication only in tandem with its basest cohabitors. Just as weeds and nettles mass around the edges of our secure dwellings, we require the rat's presence to keep us perpetually humbled, forewarned that our elevation is but a brief reprieve from whatever horrors await us when the walls crumble to ruin and decay.

So I call a truce and award him a grudging reprieve, this bold specimen of Rattus Norvegicus. Staring balefully into his beady eyes, I finally glimpse not Hell's glare but my own, his twitching whiskers confirming an ancient kinship I dare not disavow but must recognise with a rueful, resigned acceptance. I will renew the battle, haunted by his pestilential pedigree. So, in the interim, he has earned his licence to torment me, the pinnacle of evolutionary defiance, surrendering pilfered breadcrumbs to history's persistent repeating.