Stuffed Rodent Heads.

No, that's not the latest underground delicacy or transgressive college food fad. Stuffed rodent heads is my personal shorthand reference to a little pub in the English countryside where I was fortunate enough to visit one summer between my second and third years of law school.

One of the nice things about doing well in law school and going to a high-ranked law school - I went to Columbia - is the almost amazing competition among law firms to get students to come work there. The result is that students at first-tier law schools get recruited very avidly, and the summer between the second and third years of law schools turns out to be a lovely boondoggle for law students. They are wined and dined, given (at times) interesting work, taken out for shows and parties and boat rides, and paid the same as a first-year associate, which back then, in the paleolithic year of 1983, wasn't as rich as it is now, but was still pretty good. In fact, my then-girlfriend and I had a fabulous, luxurious, fun-filled summer for almost no cost at all, which was lousy training for our eventual life together as husband and wife. But that's a tale for another day. The point here is that during the summer I made enough money to pay half my law school tuition for the following year (a student loan covered the other half) and still have some left over to cover a trip to England for ten days. It was a good trip.

I met my friend David at Gatwick Airport, and we spent a pretty hectic week and a half gamboling around Old Blighty. Being young and thus heedless, we rented a car and explored the countryside. (One day I'll write a post about the pleasures of driving on the left side of the street.) Our itinerary covered a bunch of scenic and historic towns far from London, stretching from Stratford-on-Avon to Bath to Stoke-on-Trent and on up to Chester, the Lake District and York, and then back down Cambridge, ending up back in London.

Our first night on the road was spent in Stratford-on-Avon. Being young and relatively penurious, we were willing to forego the pleasures of regular hotels to get cheap lodging. So we set about to find a nice bed and breakfast at the outskirts of town. Since we were good New Yorkers, we could not resist one at the edge of the town that was named "Brooklynne." The proprietor of the Brooklynne inn was a nice woman named Mrs. Barnacle. Unfortunately, when we asked Mrs. Barnacle after dinner what there was to do in the area of Stratford-on-Avon, she had no idea. So we ended up wandering around the outskirts of town and found our way into a local pub.

I don't remember the pub's name but I do remember that pub. How could I forget it? It was very dimly lit. Very dimly. We could see some of the clientele. Some of them seemed not to have moved a muscle in decades and probably had cobwebs under their arms. They all seemed so......... well, so dingy. But the pub itself was a wonder to see. It may have been a few hundred years old, with lots of wood beams and a wood plank floor. The tables lined the walls and spilled into the middle of the big room. The bar itself was a large rectangular affair jutting into the front of the room, with glasses hanging upside down from its top and rows upon rows of taps gracing the space behind the bartender. The guidebook we were using said that the drink of choice in that section of England was called "scrumpy," which was just a local name for hard apple cider. It came in varying degrees of hardness; the maximum one, I'm told, was so alcoholic it almost burned the nose to drink it. David and I stuckwith medium strength.

We sat down at one of the tables near a window. The place was almost deserted except for the immobile denizens at the front, so we had our choice of where to sit. One seat seemed as good or as bad as another because, after all, it's not like there was much of a view out the window -- just the unhurried side street where the pub was located. So we sat down and started on our scrumpy.

Only two sips into the mug I looked up just above head level and realized we were being watched. No, not by a passerby and not by a waiter. There was a stuffed chipmunk head on the wall, and the little rodent's eyes were fixed on us. I had never seen a stuffed chipmunk head hanging on a wall before. A stuffed moose head, yes. A stuffed bear head, yes. But a chipmunk? Who would bother to pay a taxidermist to stuff the head of a chipmunk, much less mount it on the wall? Could it really have been someone's hunting trophy?

Actually, it probably wasn't a hunting trophy. I knew that because, as it turns out, every open wall space had a small stuffed rodent head on it. Not only that, but the stuffed rodent heads were all wearing clothes: each one had a small cap and a little wool scarf wrapped around its dead stuffed neck. There were chipmunks, squirrels, what looked like raccoons, some other varmint-like things. They all were attired in caps and scarves, very colorful caps and scarves, in an array of plaids and tweeds. They all looked solemn. And we were apparently the only people to take notice of them. Everyone else in the place was looking down into their glasses of whatever they were drinking. Apparently they were used to having stuffed rodent heads gazing down at them from the pub walls.

We were young back then and didn't have the nerve to actually ask someone why there were stuffed rodent heads all over the walls. It was England, after all, and from what we had heard the place was supposed to be a bit eccentric.

Looking back on it now, though, the stuffed rodent heads are nothing more than the prime example of "different strokes for different folks." No doubt the cobweb-festooned denizens of the place thought it was perfectly natural to have their drinking overseen by a collection of wall-mounted, scarf-bedecked, haberdashery-wearing furry mammals. After all, they had probably been doing it for years. So why not?

That's why, when I see someone doing something that initially strikes me as unusual, what I immediately think of is stuffed rodent heads.