Of mice, bees and women

Good news at last! Lord H laid down a couple of mouse traps last night and we were woken up at 6am by the noise of heavy scampering. Thinking an army of mice had joined forces to try to overcome us, I leapt out of bed and switched the light on in order to flush out the enemy. Only to see that a mouse had got its head caught in the trap and dragged itself out of the kitchen, across the landing and into our bedroom in order to complain. Quite impressive really. Being a farmer’s daughter, I picked the beast up, still attached to the trap, shoved it into a plastic bag and bashed it against the wall, whilst shouting Samurai triumph chants. As you do. I am indeed gracious in victory. Lord H was rather nonplussed, I have to say. Well, this is the sort of thing we used to do back on the farm, you know, and city boys can never understand it … After that, I put my coat on over my nightie, wrapped the body in another plastic bag just in case the darn thing made a miraculous recovery, and put the whole caboodle in the bin at the bottom of the garden ready for the binmen to collect today. Aha! One can only hope the neighbours didn’t choose that moment to peer out into the gloom, as Lord only knows what they would have thought I was doing. Now, however, the bloodlust is truly up so I’ve asked Lord H to get more traps so I can continue my path of destruction. Watch this space.

Meanwhile, the domestic crises continue to widen. As the middle neighbour was away in London, we agreed that we could leave the dehumidifiers on all night to try to speed up the drying process. Unfortunately, that appears to have meant that the ground floor neighbour didn’t get any sleep at all as he left a note of complaint on the hall table today, understandably enough. So we’ve now turned off the dehumidifiers and left a note of apology, suggesting we all get together and sort out a drying schedule to suit all parties. Well, we don’t really want Christmas neighbour wars – we have more than enough other disasters to cope with at the moment … I hope we can all come to a reasonable agreement and that everything gets back to normal soon. Whatever "normal" might be. Perhaps we should indeed leave it to the mice after all?

At work I am chuntering along with writing up yesterday’s minutes. I’m hoping I can get the first draft finished today, as I’m next in on Friday to do another and more scary meeting so I’d like the decks to be cleared for that one. We’ll see.

At lunch, it was the last Writers’ Group of the year. I brought along the mince pies which didn’t get opened yesterday and they opened them, hurrah! Even ate some too, which was nice. And Alan brought biscuits – so thank you, Alan. We looked at a good amount of manuscripts and played a writing game involving creating something from words I’d cut out of various publications over the weekend. I thought it would be a fun one for Christmas – an interesting selection of phrases too, all of them gleaned from The Church Times, Country Life, the Radio Times or the Saturday Telegraph. Which gives you a fairly comprehensive view of our home reading life for sure. Naturally, I couldn’t possibly cut up the Star Trek magazine though – that’s sacrosanct. Anyway, as a result, I’ve started what I think will be a short story about bees – but we’ll see.

Oh and I’ve succumbed to my first Starbucks moment for two weeks – mmm, bliss … Can’t imagine how I’ve survived without my decaff cappuccino fix.

Tonight, I’ll pop in and see Gladys on the way home. Really, her life is surprisingly normal compared to mine these days. UPDATE: I gave her some chocolates as a Christmas present which she wanted to try out there and then. So we opened them, only to see that they're the size of gobstoppers. Lord preserve us, even I, Bigmouth Brookie, would have trouble with those so there's no chance for a little old lady with no coordination and minimal teeth. Sigh. Shame on you, Mr Roses. Anyway, I left poor Gladys still struggling and advised the nurses that they should probably attempt to cut the beasts up before I'm responsible for choking the poor thing to death. Gives a whole new level of meaning to the concept of Death by Chocolate indeed ...

And here’s today’s meditation poem:

Meditation 25

When the cloud
descends
on the place of meeting

the man I follow
vanishes.
All I can do

is wait.
One day
he’ll leave me here

and that strange air
between us
will at last

be empty.


Today’s nice things:

1. Killing a mouse
2. Writers’ Group
3. Starting a short story (possibly)
4. Starbucks
5. Poetry.

Anne Brooke
Anne's website - a serial killer of mice and a bit dodgy with old ladies too ...