Build a better one

Two weeks ago, or there abouts, a mouse entered our lives rather more intimately than we felt comfortable with. It probably jumped in through the conservatory door on the Friday and, finding the interior warmer, and plentiful food supplies, settled in for a quiet winter. I first noticed its presence on Sunday when there was an unexpected rustling sound by the window when I went out to check the conservatory plants. The rustling repeated on Monday, when I went to fetch the battery lantern and then on Tuesday, as I tapped away on the keyboard of my office, next to the conservatory, a brown mouse ran behind my comfy chair from the conservatory door.

The conservatory, garden room and my office are all well interconnected, but the doors giving access further into the house are mildly more rodent proof. I started being careful about closing these doors. More worryingly, the garden room is currently being refurbished and there is access to the house wall cavity from there, end thence the loft and who knows where else.

After failing to remember where my mass-produced and highly efficient humane mouse trap is stored, I thought to use a model one I put together for the amusement of my children a few years back. This device has only ever worked once with any success, when I managed to get a mouse in my car. I found the base and the lid, baited the contraption with peanut butter in a milk carton lid and left it primed in the centre of the room, with a paint pot to prevent the lid being lifted. The following morning I found my trap with the door wedged half open with the milk lid, but no mouse in evidence except by the tooth marks in the butter.

I left the trap, more carefully primed in the same place for the next half week, and then thinking that the mouse may have suffered some trauma with it the first time round, tried moving it to a new location, but to no avail. The mouse was evidently still free and active, visiting my office again, rustling on the window sill (where there was a scattering of birdseed from a split bag).

Last Saturday, I checked the trap as normal and decided to clean out the bird feeder that hangs outside the kitchen. I levered all the old peanuts out, washed it, refilled it using a bag of nuts from the conservatory and re-hung it outside. I closed the conservatory door to the kitchen carefully behind me and sat in my office, playing on the computer. Half way through the morning there was a frantic scrabbling sound, as of trapped rodent. At last my trap has worked I thought. I walked round to the conservatory, but the trap was still open. There on the window sill the bag of peanuts was jumping around. I grabbed the top, rolled it, pegged it and peered at my little adversary. My children showed some friends up the road and then let it go 300 yards and a water course away from the house.

So I have to ask myself; had I not planted the idea of peanuts in the mouse's mind, would it still have risked the peanut bag? or was it just the most cunning psychological mouse trap ever?

Cold snap coming

Yellow adorns trees, not yet clothing, nor yet the year's floor shrouding. Large forest mammals wear their thickened coats, proof against frost's fingers, that catch the low sun glowing. Our adopted, suburban, festival of the dead marks this fall, but also the kick back of the clocks bringing colded and stilled wildlife to our road verges.

All roads, not created equal

Bloodied by yesterdays confluence of road works and accidents I swore off the nearest town route to work this morning, clogged as it already is by gas-main repairs. I was lucky yesterday to avoid the worst effects of the traffic mess, in part because I had chosen my route to pass a petrol station in case my recollection of the level of fuel in the tank had been a little optimistic.

This morning began with a plan to avoid everyone else by selecting my longer route to work and, after a couple of turns, and before I had left the village, I was confronted with a broad patch of road inundated to about 8 inches. Such is considered no barrier to navigation and so I simply drove sensibly, avoiding the bow wave of others (more suitably dressed in 4x4 vehicles) until the tarmac came to the surface again. The road carried the marks of yesterday's chaos. Tracks on the verges marked the departure of many a heavy vehicle from the hard standing, and coated the paved surface with mud. This will take a few weeks to mend at this end of the year in contrast to the New Forest Show traffic peak in July, which grasses over in a couple of weeks.

Half way and my route was disturbed again by a diversion with, rather than against my direction of travel; many vehicles that would otherwise simply cross my path now joined me for a stretch commonly blocked by wandering herds of cattle. Fortunately today there were only a few animals on the road and so the flow was steady, if busy, to the next junction where normality was resumed. I saw some deer, including a white fallow I think and a small herd calmly grazing the rain-soaked heath at Ocknell. The sky was clear in patches here though the clouds grouped into a small fleet to the East, already stacking up in height, though quite narrow.

Lunchtime was sunny, but in the afternoon it has rained cats, dogs and antelope. The antelope were mostly on the roof I think. In the usual way the car-park drains backed up after a few minutes of deluge and a lake formed over them. The intensity was such that it caused me to wonder what would happen if an inch of rain fell en-bloc. A big splash I expect, but not as pretty as the sweeping, soaking curtains that patterned the ground today , forming twisty linear shapes and paisley shapes in the gusty wind that accompanied the squalls.

Hygrometer Gate

Our front gate; our new front gate, although if I measure in sensible units, a few years old now, has a pony latch. Essential where we live; all gates have either a folding buckle latch or a sprung hook. This latch, installed by the employed rather than someone like myself, who cares about the result, is attached to the bolted gate. In my opinion, and from experience, it would be so much easier to use if it were attached to the swinging gate. Correctly installed such a latch can be managed one handed, ours may not. With loaded hands, a foot is required to steer the swinging gate to the latching point.

This latch is pinned by a coach bolt with a domed nut that tends to undo itself unless monitored by someone who cares, rather than the employed or the young. Continued attention has maintained the combination of bolt and nut through the few seasons that needed to elapse before corrosion started to do the job of holding the two in a secure embrace. The bolt passes, uncolleted, through the oaken timber.

When the timber is dry, the latch swings freely. It opens with a clank, as the latch handle digs ever deeper into the bolted gate's top rail. It closes on the swinging gate with a similar sound; useful when gardening in the back, to alert the arrival of guests. When wet, the latch will stay, stable at almost any angle, but happiest vertical. This is my hygrometer. A glance out of the kitchen window will tell me if there was rain in the night, but the pony latch will tell me how wet it was.

Most summers, the pony latch swings free, clanking and chipping the rail for several months. This summer it has been better behaved except for a broken period of about 5 weeks. According to the gate, autumn has been here for over a month, yet, the leaves are only beginning to fall now and there is much green remaining. Only the bracken seemed to turn early with the latch's sticking point.

what inner wolf?

Middle son alone joined scouting peers for a walk in the deep dusk yesterday evening. Youngest was guest at a Birthday party, oldest confined to snuffly bed.

Called out from work to be a taxi, whilst DW went out to practise her bowing muscles, proved to be an uncommon pleasure; otherwise I might have not gone out in the moonlight and had time to watch the stars and to drive the dark forest.

The moon was less than 24 hours past fullness and yet I met it with a gentle, reflective mood; no thought of howling. My inner wolf only surfaced behind the wheel, splashing through the flooded railway bridge and flying across the heaths, eyes peeled for large mammals on the way, but only finding a strolling toad to steer around.

Autumn. Yes.

As the structures were left behind and the first lawn spread out, a broad and unusually lit view was revealed. In the sky a deep bank of cloud held grey from West to East with, below, a lighter band just beginning to leach a fringe of rain streaks. The ground was still well lit showing a condensed flock of seagulls to the right and sparse ponies in ones and twos munching on the wet grass to the left. The spattering of water on the windscreen coalesced and ran and the gloom deepened before the next stand of trees which held off the rising wind but pattered the road with loosened leaves and ripe seed cases.

Local traffic pulled off the road, delivering workmen and tools, out of my way before the next heath by which point the rain was meandering already across and along the road, reflecting light from the thinner cloud patches. Water on the heath had collected into pools divided by ditches and banks designed to prevent motoring ingress, forming a terraced effect that in other places might soon be seeded with rice. A robust red cow stood facing the road allowing its calf, standing with forelegs in the ditch to suckle comfortably. She watched me breeze by on the opposite gutter, unworried by the falling wet.

A left turn and my senses were briefly fooled by the lighter reflection under the wings of a descending crow; thinking it a larger raptor in this part frequented in previous years by a buzzard often standing on the grass, or swooping low under branches by the road. Another crow (maybe young) was disturbed from its perch as I barrelled by. The clouds looked ridged, rather than ragged, although hanging curtains of rain decorated the dark edges in a receding pattern, like stacked veils.

Before the trees approached the road, the junctions and bends, dips and concealing shadows I had time to watch the raindrops falling towards me. Straight and parallel, then buoyed up by the car's passage through the yielding air, curving upwards again to hit the screen or be swept over. Closer to my work, sun again cut through, low; making me squint at the junctions, making deep pools of darkness beneath boughs.

A pick a pen is not

Over a year into my experiments with plucked instruments and 8 months after investing in a mandolin that is actually playable I have learnt something about the right hand technique.

For all this time I have been holding the pick (the plectrum) as if it were a pen. All the illustrations of hands holding picks show the index finger tucked under, the pick against the first knuckle, but when I held a pick it was almost always near the tip of my finger and all the action was coming from the fingers, using the fine control muscles that I use for writing - wrong!

The action has to come from the wrist; the digits mere grips for the pick and, suddenly, striking two strings is possible.

This revelation followed some experimentation with different picks. For months I'd been using a 2mm large triangle. I bought a Dunlop Americana, some Ultex Vs, polycarb and nylon stubbies and the break through came with the 3mm stubby for some reason. I think it helped that I had been trying to strum more recently too. I had tried, with my old and incorrect technique to change the grip on the pick, but it wasn't really helping. Unfortunately I have a lot to unlearn now and find it difficult to play anything accurately. The sound is much better though, with less tightness, two strings and a better ring. The main improvement is an immediate introduction of rhythm; it is so much easier to space the notes with the whole hand moving. I had been struggling to join up a tapping foot with the finger movements.