Bored (IP-ish)

So here I am. It's 8:30 AM with an entire Saturday to use up and already I'm bored. It's not that I don't have anything to do, I just don't want to do it, so I'll look at the IP instead. A classic displacement activity.

I first came across the term displacement activity in a book called Mice All Over, which I read when I was twelve. Peter Crowcroft, the author, was hired by the now defunct Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food to investigate the behaviour of house mice, which were causing havoc to Britain's grain stocks. At the time nobody knew much about mice beyond the fact that they were small, furry, of great interest to cats, and ate hundreds of tons of food that people wanted for themselves.

There was no point in studying mice in a cage: all they do in those circustances is eat, drink and sleep. Crowcroft got hold of an unused grain warehouse, made lots of spy holes in the loft, released a few families of mice into the building, and settled back to see what happened.

Two years later he was still there. The social behaviour of mice was far more complicated than anybody had ever imagined. Crowcroft produced the scientific papers his employers wanted and the new knowledge made sure that mice could be controlled effectively. No longer did farmers just lock cats in their grain stores and hope for the best. Poison in grain stores had never been a good idea in the first place, for obvious reasons. But the best thing to come from the research was Crowcroft's book, Mice All Over.

In 1966, when the book was published, Crowcroft temporarily became a celebrity almost on a par with Desmond Morris. The book was beautifully written, Crowcroft said it cost him infinitely more time and effort than writing mere scientific papers. I got a copy from the library and was an instant fan. Now, when I hear mice in my own loft, I know what the tail-rattling means and how to interpret the pauses in activity or sudden scurrying. Then I call the council to put down some poison. There's no room for sentiment when your electrical wiring is at stake.

Now the book is forgotten. It has been out of print for decades and you can only get dog-eared copies from antiquarian book sellers, and only then if you're very lucky. In my opinion it deserves to be revived. Without having read it, how else would I be able to recognise my own displacement activities?

This has been a double displacement activity: I've avoided doing anything constructive for half an hour, and then gone on to avoid the IP. Damn, I'm good at it!