Enlightenment from the Guru

Despite actually being quite keen to get to work this morning, I travelled by the long route. The New Forest is too beautiful to miss at this time of year and, even though many trees have already given up on the whole photosynthesis jive, the custard maple still retains a smattering of leaves and the rest lie, like a sweet vanilla pool, around its trunk.

The roads were blessedly quiet and I enjoyed an unhurried drive, pausing only to watch a lapwing standing on the green and slowing a little to see some huge, half-highland bred cows with horns quite suited to moving pallets.

Last night, in the clear sky, on the way to play badminton, I saw Jupiter shining brightly down. Unsurprisingly, in the second half of November, it was jolly cold as a result.

The shade of trees

Fluorescent kitchen light and the dawn, softened by mist, in the garden set the two apart, as if from alternate realities. The residue of morning brew stuck to the glass made the division tangible, echoing the mist in an optical haze.

An early newspaper, as much for the walk as the news, took me across the green where the fences and hedges and ponies loomed slowly out of the fog, gaining colour and, it seemed, solidity with approaching steps, only to gently lose it over the shoulder. The first pony, cut first in silhouette, slowly resolved to a rainbow of browns; dark flanks, almost black tail and a mane that almost looked fresh from the colourist, with pale highlights amongst the chocolates. The colours spoke to the genetic hamster in me of ripe autumn nuts ready for winter storage.

With the mist there was, as always, a stillness reflected in the standing water. The only ripples raised by falling droplets from the mossy trees. An interesting reversal against the convention of sheltering trees; beneath their boughs was the only rain.

The still surfaces of pools reflected poorly, asthough they had their own coating of condensation. The surfaces were slightly oily, dusty; perhaps with the particles of slowly digesting leaves that have already given up the exercise of floating and have sunk to rest cold, on the mud.

The noise of an inaccessible aircraft rattled the air a little as my stroll turned back towards the ostensible objective. The engine note rose a little, fell, and then I thought I heard the whine of stage 1 flaps extending. I rather hoped that the pilot knew where he was. It was only with the loss of the aero-engine roar that I became aware of the birdscape. A few desultory twitterings raised above the ambience only for short robin disputes, but by the church there was an early practice for the starlings' spring - clicks and chatters and preludes in keys minor and major.

to the tip and back

Unaccustomed as I am to keeping pets, I had a novel time on Saturday, on my way to the waste tip, with a pet mouse. I rather thought of him as a pet mouse, even though I was only a little certain that he was in the car somewhere. I had certainly seen him run out of one of the bulk-bags of garden waste that I had loaded into the back of the car. He jumped from the bag onto the rear door pillar, up to the ceiling and then downwards, to disappear into the pile of rubbish and the mouse-sized holes left by the folding rear seats.

I wasn't wholly surprised to discover that mice were living in the bags, although they had only been on the drive for two weeks, awaiting some time in the shorter autumn days when the bags were dry enough and the waste site open. I thought I saw, out of the corner of my eye, as I loaded up, a running brown creature leave the bag before I moved it. Evidently it had not been alone.

I left the car door open as I finished loading and, once I was at the waste site, I left them open again, hoping that the mouse would find its own way out. No sign of the mouse as I tipped the rubbish, but no sign that it had escaped either.

Once home I put a tidy blob of peanut butter on an old jam lid and placed it in the shadow under the back seats, where the boy's floor litter already provided a deal of cover for furtive mammals (and, on closer inspection, some food too). Checking the lid an hour later revealed tooth prints, so I continued the search I had already begun for the humane mouse trap I've owned since having mice invade my loft in a house I owned 20 years ago. Although I've seen the trap a few times, I couldn't place it. I did manage to find the base of a mouse trap I made for the boys to use in the back garden about three years ago. Youngest son managed to find the matching lid nearby under something else in the garden border. I oiled the moving parts a little to make the door shut reliably, transferred the peanut butter onto the trigger platform and, with little belief in this untested mechanism, made myself busy for a long enough period, so I thought, for the mouse to get hungry and curious again.

Youngest son followed me out and when I opened the car door it was to find the trap closed. I lifted it, unable to tell from the weight whether there was an additional mouse present. I peeled the lid carefully, and there he was, tiny, with beady eyes and whiskers. I handed the trap to youngest who set out to show his brothers. “Not in the house I advised”, putting the car seats back together before following on. Eldest came out to see and, in the porch, there was a scrabbling and the mouse leaped out, and into the hall.

The pile of shoes and outdoor-wear nearest the door finally revealed a small and scared mouse. Eldest cupped him gently, too gently, and whilst trying to get a better look, released him once again, where-upon he ran into the dining room. I was rather getting over the pleasures of having a pet mouse by this time, but after moving a few toys the mouse was again found, although he appeared to be limping a little; I suspect from trying to make an escape behind a hot radiator, since there were now balls of fluff hanging from its base. Mouse was confined now to another ice-cream container, until safely outside, where, after stopping to clean himself, he recovered the full use of all four limbs and dashed into the shrubbery.