To avoid conflict with rodents, it is a custom to show respect by writing to them. This is a letter to a rat. Dear Rat, we have been observing each other for a few minutes this afternoon. We meet on neutral territory, where the human diurnal and nocturnal rat worlds become blurred. It’s unusual to encounter your kin in broad daylight; why are you taking such a risk? You come out of a hole in that wall, climb down a twist of honeysuckle into a flagged yard. A bird feeder, raided by a squirrel, has spilled its peanuts. You tuck a nut or two in your chops and run back to the wall, ignoring the honeysuckle, and rock-climb quickly back to your hole to deposit the nuts, before repeating the journey. You follow the same route every time, but pause occasionally to sense another’s presence. For my part, I do not see you as dirty, a police informer or drunk. Your feet are too delicately naked to carry your reputation for filth. Your fur has glamour. Your eyes flash jet. Your ears, nose and whiskers twitch with senses that detect a shared existence: we are all products of the traces created by dramas of our own making. Our interactions spread into the infinite, we move about in a dynamic system of interrelations – a kinship, despite our cultures demanding we stay the hell away from each other. It’s your tail that freaks people out most, as if it’s a dipstick for disease, a fuse for your furry bomb, a chimeric reptilian antenna conducting some alien-plague-swarm-ageddon. Your tail is legend. You run and climb with an assured grace, between worlds, collecting the peanuts, deviating little from your plan, creating a map on the ground from the one in your head. What happens in your society, we imagine as the sniving dark behind the wall. What happens in your society, we imagine as the sniving dark behind the wall. I apologise for what we know about the neurological creation of memory and the process of learning, having been learned from the dissected brains of euthanised rats after experiments in laboratories. What we have yet to learn is when to leave the sinking ship.