Mouses in the Houses...

An explanation will be needed methinks before I begin...

We live in a small stone cottage in the middle of nowhere in particular...it isn't a quaint cottage with little quirky rooms and interesting corners...it's three rooms in a row with a small kitchen built on the back and the back lobby which was tacked on by somebody with more enthusiasm than skill.

If you are really brave and clamber up into the roof space, you can see bits of thatch left over from when the whole roof was thatched...it's slate tiles now, with lumps of moss growing on them.

But it is the old stone walls which cause our wildlife population to expand in the winter...

You hear odd scuffling's and the occasional loud squeak...the dogs each open one eye and hastily close it again...the mouses are back.

They charge across the kitchen floor in the evenings and move their beds about in the roof and drag tired mouse children up and down the roof beams...they sharpen their teeth on the water pipes and fall headlong from roof to floor inside the walls...they make cosy nests of bits of my wool under the bed in cardboard boxes and stuff dozens of teeny pink babies inside.

Big, fat, important looking mice run up the sides of the bookshelves in broad daylight and I've seen them run straight across Bobby's paws...but Bobby hasn't the sense he was born with and I doubt he notices.

Trouble is, mice carry germs, however endearing they may be...so in the end Himself gets the traps out and baits them with peanut butter and leaves them in strategic places and they go Snap in the night and then he puts the sad little bodies on the range and I suppose they go to mouse heaven.

They come back of course...not the deaded ones...don't think anyone has ever seen mouse ghosts, not they've 'fessed up to anyway...phantom dogs and horses perhaps...but not mices.

We have rats sometimes...in the roof.

Now...I cannot be having rats...they have to go and I don't care that they have bright beady eyes and long whiskers and dear little paws...proper traps, that mean the business, go up there baited with lumps of cheese and Himself puts gloves on and wobbles about on the step ladder while I hang onto the bottom of the ladder for grim death and hope my oxygen tube doesn't go Ping and smack me in the face...

Summertime brings in bats and spiders...big furry moths and baby birds...

That'll be for another time.