Notting Hill Killer - 01/07/07
This week, I a killed a fellow Notting Hill mammal, in cold blood, as it looked into my eyes.

I’d been sitting at the kitchen table working on my laptop when I heard a high-pitched scream from the garden, which the kitchen overlooks through sliding glass doors. I went outside but could see nothing, though next door’s cat was acting oddly. Usually it runs a mile when it sees me because I persecute it with a water pistol for shitting in my children’s sandpit. But it seemed reluctant to flee.

I went back to work – when you’re paid by the item for website hotel listings, you have to keep your nose to the grindstone. That instinct that tells you when you’re being watched made me look up. A large rat was peering at me through the glass doors. Grabbing my camera I moved towards it and opened the doors. I could see that the cat had got it; there were two raw-looking flesh wounds on its haunches.

It first hid behind the plastic tank where Lisa, the giant African landsnail lives. Then it scuttled into the gap between the garden shed and the back wall of the house, cornering itself.

I decided I had to kill it. I put a piece of board across the gap where it had entered its dead end. Then I considered how I should execute it. The garden fork? No, I really didn’t fancy having it pronged on my fork. I hit upon the lawn edger, a half-moon shaped piece of steel with something similar to a spade handle and a reasonably sharp edge.

Now the rat was quite still. I looked at it. It looked back at me. I put the lawn edger in position, a foot above its neck, and hesitated.

I’ve killed quite a lot of animals in my life. When I was a kid in the Scottish countryside cruelty was certainly frowned upon but the despatch of an animal was perfectly acceptable.

We used to shoot wood pigeons with .22 air rifles. On Sundays, I would often hunt rabbits with ferrets in the allotments behind my house. We used to chase rabbits across the fields in a minivan, one of us driving, the other blasting at the rabbits with a .22. I don’t remember ever actually hitting one.

Years later, I was on a first trip with a new girlfriend, cycling along the lanes of Norfolk. We came across a pigeon with a broken wing; I said I'd put it out of its misery. Wringing its neck seemed the best option. Unfortunately, its head came off in my hand. Mind you, it was ten years before we divorced.

Though I'm normally a big fan of invertebrates, I kill slugs and snails in my garden on an industrial scale, using poison. I tried letting them be last summer and they ate about 50 percent by volume of all the things I grew.

The most unexpectedly shocking animal death I ever saw was the ritual slaughter of a sheep when I lived in the Sudan. It was the Eid Festival at the end of Ramadan and I was staying at the house of some Sudanese friends.

The elderly fellow who killed sheep came round to attend to the animal that was tethered in their yard. Two men of the household gently held the beast and the old fellow spoke softly to it and then, with an almost chilling tenderness, drew a blade across its throat.

A jet of blood erupted from its half-severed neck, its tongue lolled and its legs slowly folded under it. Much to my surprise, I felt faint and had to sit down. It soon passed; 20 minutes later, I was happily eating barbecued bits of the animal. I’d refused, probably rudely, the favourite delicacy, raw intestines.

I am very sorry to say that when I brought the lawn edger down on the rat’s neck, the blow failed to finish it off immediately. It ran frantically around its trap for 20 seconds then stopped. My second blow brought the whole sorry episode to an end.