28th June 2026
The veteran American director and actor Mel Brooks is 100 today. Every man in my age bracket was a teenager in the late 1970s/early 1980s and will never forget giggling hysterically at the farting scene in ‘Blazing Saddles’ or his turn as Louis XlV in ‘History of the World Part 1’. There never was a Part 2 – a sad loss to cinema. Congratulations on your centenary, Mr Brooks 👏
It was actually another American actor who inspired this blog post – the great Gene Hackman. Still probably best remembered for his Oscar-winning performance as Popeye Doyle in the 1971 classic bearing the same title as this post, the only French connection I can think of between these two titans of cinema is the aforementioned Louis XlV:
Separated at birth. Or maybe not.
Unfortunately Gene fell a few years short of his own century, passing away last year at 95. And now we come to the rather macabre reason why he inspired these scribblings: he died merely a week after his much younger wife, apparently unaware of her death despite her body lying inert in their home. Dementia is a terrible thing. Now, her death is the real nub of this post: she died of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome. What on earth’s that? Well – it’s a rare respiratory disease caused by inhaling a virus from infected rodent urine, droppings or saliva. It was last spotted despatching three passengers on the MV Hondius, a cruise ship sailing from Argentina to the Cape Verde islands earlier this year. I trust, dear readers, you’re all having a lovely time reading this jolly tale 😆
So what has any of this got to do with Pollards Mill?! Well – it’s to give you an honest glimpse into the unglamorous side of life on a former plantation house surrounded by fields. Rats and mice are a fact of life. We invest in appropriate control measures to keep them out from under our feet, but unsurprisingly they quite like the dark recesses found in more distant corners of the estate. In particular, the Lair of the Beast – less exotically known as the shed where the drive mower lives. It doesn’t live alone!
The shed is full of absolutely tons of junk. It’s obvious that the people working for the previous owner never tried to dispose of things which had outlived their use. They just chucked them in there. Quite a selection: highlights include old tyres, broken trolleys, dozens of offcuts of wood, thousands of nails, a catering double sink unit, an entire fitted kitchen and an uncountable number of unidentifiable bits of rusted metal.
Nor is the shed lacking in local fauna. Alongside huntsman spiders, centipedes, cockroaches and whip-tailed scorpions there are, of course, rats. You can smell ‘em! So – for our latest project we needed some sensible kit to avoid us both going the same way as poor Betsy Hackman:
Recommended for harmful dust? That’ll do nicely. So what’s this project, then? Stay tuned to find out soon…
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