Cookshop owner deploys Lock & Lock to combat mouse!

Tuesday, 19 July 2011 08:33

LIZ MURRAY

Owner, The Cookcraft Kitchen Shop, Berwick-upon-Tweed, Northumberland

“I’ve had enough. It’s war!” exclaimed my husband fiercely, exasperation furrowing his Celtic brow. Now, while it’s not unprecedented for a Scotsman to pick a fight, Mr Murray’s rugby playing days (and some of his original body parts) are long behind him and he’s not lately been given to outbursts of aggressive intent. But he had been provoked beyond endurance, and for once it wasn’t my fault.

Because this made me laugh, I felt temporarily lenient towards the mouse, but my own tipping point came soon after. One morning I discovered it had not only munched through a biscuit tin and made inroads into the custard creams, it had also chewed my toaster tongs and tried to carry them off nestwards, abandoning them under the fridge. “Rodent,” I cried, “don’t you dare eat my kitchenware!”Thus hostilities commence against the Mouse of Zorro. Mr Murray takes the offensive position with strategic attack; I take the defensive with rearguard action. He deploys the full armoury of mouse battling equipment - various instruments of decapitation, sticky pads for literally stopping it in its tracks, and a sonic device to give it a persistent headache, hopefully causing it to move out (though I did tentatively mention that teenagers have been using this tactic on grownups for generations without success).  

Meanwhile I deploy Lock & Lock. Every evening, as he is busy baiting traps with organic peanut butter, I stow loose foodstuffs and the tastier looking kitchen utensils in secure storage. Mice can penetrate pretty much any substance: wood, concrete, plate-glass, steel - even Tupperware. But, as we discovered, Lock & Lock is not only moisture- and air-tight, is it also rodent-proof. Which turns a deplorable domestic incursion to my professional advantage. Or it will do, once I can get a good angle on the sales possibilities.

You see, retailers are fundamentally unlike normal people; our brains are differently wired. A normal person looks at the wonders of the universe - landscapes, seascapes, architecture, David Attenborough programmes - and says “How astonishingly breathtakingly marvellous”. Whereas a retailer says “Mmm, yes, lovely. How can I use it to maximise my sales potential?” Conversely, a normal person looks at a plastic box and sees a plastic box; whereas a retailer sees an extraordinary piece of ingenuity with a range of fascinating applications. Housewares retailers are particularly skewed in this way, as we are lateral thinkers who believe there is always an alternative use for something, and therefore always a reason to sell something other than for its original purpose. Hence my ability to regard an infestation of vermin as an intriguing storage challenge rather than an undesirable hygiene deficit.

When you think about it, storage solutions lie at the very heart of human evolution. We’ve been inventing ways to safeguard our food and possessions since we first stood up and looked about us. Storage predates communications technologies, space travel and keyhole surgery by millennia. Without it, there would be no agricultural development, no native industry nor international trade, no supermarkets, pyramids or picnics. Worse, if there were no need for storage, there would be no IKEA, and how culturally impoverished would we be then?

My roll call of Lock & Lock sales is testament to the fact that there is no problem so large (or small) that it hasn’t got a storage solution. I’ve sold Lock & Lock to a soldier in Afghanistan to keep sand out of his smalls. I’ve sold it to a tobacconist to keep his snuff fresh. I’ve sold Lock & Lock to a sailor to keep his emergency flares dry, and to a cameraman in the Amazon to keep spiders off his lenses. Surely it’s not beyond me to sell Lock & Lock to Scotsmen to keep mice out of their porridge oats? Even the Mouse of Zorro.
 
Reprinted with kind permission of Housewares Magazine (featured in the May/June 2011 issue)