Ratty!

We have a new friend! My mum, brother and I were all in the veg patch this evening spraying white fly and generally getting each other very wet (I say each other, they were both spraying me!) when I saw this white thing with a fairly long tail run from behind my brother. I went over to have a look, and this little fellow was just stood next to the water butt! At first my dad thought it was wild and obviously wasn't too keen on its survival, but seeing as it hadn't run off or attacked us we realised it must be an escaped pet or something. We've got quite a lot of pets, but nothing like a rat (we have a hamster, but they're not all that similar) so we really didn't know what to do with it. If it stayed out in the wild it could be attacked by other rats or become malnourished, so mum knocked on a few doors whilst me and dad fed it hamster food. We couldn't find anyone with a lost rat though, and there weren't any posters around the area or in the post office window, and no vets take rats, so we were getting pretty desperate! Mum rang loads of people, even my grandma who had rats as a young girl, but nobody could tell us anything at all.
So, we've put him in a big shrub pot with some small wire over the top so that he can't escape in the night, and he's currently curled up asleep at the bottom of the pot in the kitchen :) Sorry it's not a very good photo, but he moved so fast that they all turned out really blurry. Hopefully tomorrow we'll find somewhere to take him, whether that's to the owner or Woodgreen animal shelter.

Anyway I will be doing that post about my holiday at some point this week, it's taken me long enough! There will probably be a separate one about my pretty big charity shop haul, I did super well up there!