Tom and Jerry Lied
Charlotte Booth • 24 November 2021
Life of a country-based writer
The mouse.
Whilst quietly reading, or watching TV, out of the corner of my eye I see a brisk movement and spy the small, cute, sleek body of the mouse disappear behind the TV or under the sofa.
As this isn’t the 1950s I don’t jump onto a chair waving a broom. Instead, I grab a Tupperware box and start dismantling the front room.
This has been done four times now, pulling out the sofa, pulling out the TV stand and dislodging some of the most terrifying spiders I have ever seen. I am sure one of them had a flick knife. If that is what is hiding behind the TV, and the mouse is happy to hang out there, I am wondering if me and my Tupperware box are going to be enough.
As you can imagine this approach hasn’t been very effective, so I brought out the humane trap baited with hula hoops and rich tea biscuits. My other half started with cheese, “like the cartoons”, and I had to burst a major childhood bubble by telling him that Tom and Jerry is not a documentary.
Every morning we check the trap and nothing. But to be honest I am secretly relieved. I have this thought that I’ll come down one morning and the mouse will be in the trap, and in my dressing gown and slippers I will end up traipsing up the road through my village to set it free far away from the house. However, as I am walking back to the house, the mouse will run past at speed, nip in the front door and kick it shut squeaking “squatter’s rights” as I am left on the doorstep.
To avoid this, I hit Google to find out how to get rid of mice humanely. So now the house smells of peppermint oil (apparently they hate it) and we have blocked any likely holes, which are a lot in an 18th century flint cottage.
The most laughable advice is ‘get a cat’ as a mere whiff of the cat will see the mouse running for cover, which makes me wonder if Tom and Jerry was actually a documentary.
Meet Mesha (pictured above), my 16 year old Bengal cat, who in her younger years was constantly bringing me mouse and bird carcasses as gifts, or worse live birds and frogs. She had an attempt at a squirrel once, but soon scooted into the house and the safety of the bed.
But apparently, she has now retired, and whilst she will happily hunt leaves and scary flick knife wielding spiders she is very relaxed as she watches the mouse run past her. Then she looks at me like I am insane as I rearrange the front room trying to catch it, once again.
Maybe this lack of inaction is a protest. She has rigorously maintained her 4:30am alarm clock regime so she hasn’t completely retired all frustrating cat behaviour. Perhaps the quality of the food isn’t up to her standards, the blankets aren’t fluffy enough or the beds not soft enough.
Either way, I feel I am being mocked by the furry mammals in my house. The cat in her silent retirement protest and by the mouse who shrugs like “what are you going to do?” I wonder if Mesha is giving the mouse back handers when I’m not looking, saying “Keep it up” until her unspecified demands are met.
So, what do we do about Squeaky McSqueakmas? I figured as he lives here now I may as well name him.
I don’t want to go down the route of traditional traps and getting the exterminator in with poison could upset the quite frankly pointless cat.
I thought I would quickly write this, between the appointments with dismantling the front room furniture armed with peppermint oil and a Tupperware box to explain the tardiness in writing blogs. Hopefully normal service will be resumed soon.
There is nothing more amusing than checking out mediaeval artistic renditions of lions and other heraldic creatures. These beasts, grimacing and gurning are a strange juxtaposition of human, animal and demon and as far from the cute image of Alex from the Madagascar franchise or in fact a real lion as you could possibly get. There are three main reasons mediaeval lions are so ‘bad’ and un-representational; The artists were following a very tight brief. Some of the artists may never have seen a lion, and were following the descriptions they were given. These lions were representing heraldic principals of bravery, nobility and authority; all very human characteristics. When viewed through this lens it becomes more understandable why they look the way they do, but they are still ‘not right’ and not a great tool for learning about lions. Generative AI is very similar to an uninformed but talented mediaeval artist. There is a element of intelligence but at the end of the day it is following a brief, with no actual ‘knowledge’ of the thing it is producing. As an example, if you prompt your generative AI (ChatGPT and the like) to produce a blog for your new product or service, aimed at your ideal customer avatar you will in all likelihood get a mediaeval lion out the other end. Sort of recognisable, and sort of not. This is because AI doesn’t know what a customer is (ideal or otherwise), has no idea what your product or service is and does, and has no true understanding of how this service or product will serve your ideal customer and their needs. Of course, AI is pulling all the information available from the internet to help with its answer but there is no understanding there. There is no determining fact from falsehoods or even which websites are trustworthy and which are not. So, it skims the internet and puts together content which suits the brief as it understands it. This is then when the actual work should start as this content shouldn’t be used in the raw. It should be edited and tweaked by a human who DOES understand the brief, has been a customer (ideal or otherwise) and can imagine what your ideal customer will feel when using your product or services. We are in a world now, where we have generative AI promoting products and services to humans, when it has no concept of what a human is and how it thinks, meaning the marketing department are in fact more important than ever for ensuring content and copy is aimed at humans and human emotions. You could argue that the world would be a more entertaining place if there were more mediaeval lions in it, but it wouldn’t be a great environment for learning, or for basing purchasing decisions on. If you want to maintain the human element in your content, then I would love to help . Explain the brief, your CTA and your ideal client and I will know what I need to ask to get a clear idea before writing. Then you can rest assured your content was written by a human for a human and we can leave the mediaeval lions to the museums.
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