I have been thinking about Coogee. This used to be the view from my bedroom window. Now my view is a petrol station and a gay brothel. But that's ok, at least I can't hear the garbage trucks. Anyway.


Some time ago now, a friend and I went out to get ice cream, or maybe we had been shopping, I can't remember and it's irrelevant. The point is we had been out, and we were on our way back in, it was extremely hot and all we wanted to do was go back in the house and nap. Actually, it's coming back to me: we'd been at the beach because it was so hot, but the water was so cold and I was so lacking in willpower that we didn't make it into the water.

Up the stairs we came, and I looked into my pot plant to see if it needed water. I noticed that there was some kind of rock or something in the parsley and bent down to take a closer look because I didn't really remember there being a rock in my parsley... It was a dead rat. A Dead RAT.

Taken by surprise, I started shrieking, at which point my friend realised that it was a dead rat, and joined in on the shrieking. I was convinced all of a sudden that our creepy neighbour must have put the dead rat in the pot plant, because how else could it have gotten there? I thought he had it in for us; maybe the dead rat was the precursor to much worse things! What would be next?? We would wake to horse heads!? My hysteria took over momentarily.

Do you know that saying about how it's worse to find half a worm in your apple than it is to find a whole one? Well here's question for you to ponder...what's worse than a dead rat?

My face was right up close to that damn pot plant when the rat stirred it's little head and looked me in the eye. He was pretty pissed that we had woken him up from his rat-nap in my nice cushiony bed of parsley. I squealed. It was involuntary.

I never ate any of that parsley ever again. Ever.