Random Rodents And Cosmic Alignments

Sometimes when I'm on the streets taking photos, I come across scenes that seem just too good to be true. While doing street photography, obviously I am on the lookout for interesting things, therefore I'm more alert to spot these things, but I'm still quite astonished that most people just walk by without as much as acknowledging the cosmic alignment of stars🐀

🐀

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True Story

London is a mouse infested town. You see them everywhere you go - the underground, on fields, in the street corners and of course in your home. This may come as a surprise to people that don't live in London, but mice are part and parcel of the city🐀

Less prominent, but also present, are rats. While mice are deceptively cute, rats don't hide who they are. In that way, they are more honest. They're rodents of the underworld who, like any other creatures, need to survive. Part of the survival is finding food, which they have to occasionally come to the surface to do🐀

Our streets here are full of rat food that used to be human food that has been nonchalantly discarded improperly. As such, London streets are heaven, and irresistible, to scavengers such as rats🐀

Anyhow, I came across this scene a few years ago. I was chauffeuring my mother around London while she shopped at her favourite local markets. This particular scene took place on one of the off streets of Peticoat Lane which is traditionally a fashion and clothing market. There are food stalls there which are frequented by city workers who, like most Londoners, treat the streets as one giant trash bin🐀

A rat in pain sight is at many risks. If one of the many street cats don't get it, then a dog or human might. Some of the dead rats observable on the streets would even have been killed indoors and casually thrown out unto the streets where it becomes someone else's problem🐀

What I found interesting from the photography point of view was the juxtaposition of the wall art and the dead rodent.

I did wonder which came first, and did someone set up the scene like this on purpose. I wouldn't put it past London's crazy artsy hipsters to be honest. They would do something like this for their art🐀

The rat obviously hadn't been there for too long judging by the state of decomposition. It could also be that a graffiti artist saw the dead rodent and quickly threw up a drawing. That is unlikely, however, judging by the fact that the ink wasn't fresh on the walls🐀

I concluded that it was most likely a random thing, and I just happened to spot it. Someone deliberately setting this up would probably have placed the rat closer to the art - perhaps directly below🐀


What do you think? Random or set up?



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Pretty sure there's a part of the world cringing at such a waste of food :D

We have too much food here. A lot of it is wasted as they "expire" on the supermarket shelves. The rest are thrown away by people that buy more than they can eat.

Too Much ''GMO'S'' You Mean?

I was actually referring to 'Rats' as food, but I guess both work :D

Ewww. I get it now :)

What a strange juxtaposition. The grafitti artist maybe spotted a rat in their peripheral vision and got subconscious inspiration.
We have lots of rodents in Glasgow too. On the underground you can see mice scurrying about on the tracks, and I once spotted a large rat sitting on the edge of a dustbin near Charing Cross (Charing Cross Glasgow, not London). More bizarre was the squashed corpse of an enormous toad on a west end pavement...
Yesterday I was doing outdoor climbing at Auchinstarry, a reclaimed quarry. There was a dead mouse at the foot of the climb we were doing. We were wondering if it was an omen :D! The poor rodent had probably frozen to death while trying to get back to its burrow. I wasn't able to take a photo, as it was so cold my phone suddenly packed in!

I know that place in Glasgow as I used to work there back in the day :)
In many ways, it is similar to London in that urban decay way. I remember (unwisely) walking around and trying to photograph the Gorbals and seeing quite a bit of it there. I should probably do a story about that one day haha.

You worked in Glasgow! Yes, you'll definitely have to write a story about that :)

That's quite a big one by all means, and it brings a kind of feeling deep down because our home here is like a castle, these guys come and go like emperors. Who would suspect that London has a lot of mice and rat

LOL. yeah.
London is mouse city. They were here first before the humans :)

London is mouse city. They were here first before the humans :)

Can you imagine that lol. Well the fatter we feed and the wasteful we become the more they thrive

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