Australia - adventures

Ok so perhaps the word 'adventure' is a little too dramatic. We really didn't fly all this way to throw ourselves into anything too exciting or in any way dangerous. The aim was simply to visit and spend time with Kate's brother and his wife who volunteered their home to accommodate us and made us feel very welcome. We were accompanied, however, by our son Ben and his wife Naomi and they are both younger and more adventurous than us. Sitting on the stoop watching the birds come for their morning feed was never going to be enough for them.

A walk in the 'bush' kept them content for a short while, followed by a dip in our host's pool.

A couple of trips to Rainbow Beach to swim in the sea was quite an experience for us all too, the waves being a little too big for any actual swimming and it was really just about being bashed around.

The cooling off in a creek on the way back was most welcome though, surprisingly cool despite the heat of the day.

Our hosts also put some bikes at our disposal, one of which was electric, although ancient and heavy enough to be a serious health risk and quite difficult to manoeuvre around tight corners.

Then there was a bit of dolphin feeding at Tin Can Bay where these animals are so used to us that they come to the same place every day for breakfast.

These might have qualified as adventures for us but for our younger family they wanted more, much more. So first of all they booked us all on a coach tour to Fraser Island. 

This proved to be quite an adventure since the island (known now by its original name, K'gari, where the 'K' is silent) has no actual roads. From the ferry the ruggedly constructed bus took us along the beach before heading inland along rutted sandy tracks which bounced us all over the place, to visit a swimming lake and to show us the dense sub-tropical rainforest that covers the island.

We'd hardly started along the beach when we started seeing dingos, an animal the island hosts a considerable number of. These creatures are not to be messed with nor enticed with food and they will chase anything that runs away from them, apparently. There are strict rules about not feeding them and although we felt quite safe up in our four-wheel drive bus one has to wonder about the other holiday-makers making use of their rather smaller four-wheel drive 'utes' to visit the island and even camping out on the beach itself.

One of the main points of interest on the tour was the wreck of the Scottish built ship 'Maheno' towards the north end of the island

and then another treat for us tourists was when one of our coach drivers pulled out his didgeridoo and started playing, the sound carrying right through the dense forest.

With no time to recover from our island adventure, the following day saw us waving farewell to our younger family who had booked a two day canoeing trip in the Everglades, an area of rainforest not far from where we were staying.

This involved kayaking into the wilderness for a whole day, an overnight camp in a tent -hardly luxury - then paddling back the following day. Apparently there was wildlife a plenty but fortunately no encounters with large biting things.

For us elders, of course, the entire holiday was something of an adventure, even the final few days before our flight home which we spent in Brisbane, on which more is coming soon.

Australia - the language

Just to be clear, unless you're an Australian the word 'creek' is the noise made by walking on a loose floorboard and the word for water running off a hill is a 'stream' or if you're in Scotland, a 'burn'. Using the word 'thongs' to describe a pair of flip-flops could lead to an embarrassing misunderstanding but 'gummies' referring to waterproof rubber boots does seem to make some sense. All these are examples of differences that have crept into everyday use in Australia.

None of which explains how the pedestrian lights in Maryborough transformed into the Mary Poppins 'brolly' down or 'brolly' up symbols nor indeed why this 'sheila' (beautifully dressed lady) was so willing to have her picture taken. (This town is where P L Travers, author of the Mary Poppins novels, was born.) 

Maryborough also gave us an iron pig, 

a close encounter with a train, 

a spectacular 'dunny'...

...and some incredibly old trees.

What more could you ask for.

On our visit there we were blessed with a sighting of a pair of 'brumbies' (wild horses) grazing at the side of the road 

then on our return through Poona we finally got to see what any visit to Australia would not be complete without. (It turned out Poona is pretty much overrun with 'roos'.)

On one of our trips out we visited an 'op' shop, something we might have called a charity shop, and on the drive there we kept seeing yellow road signs with the word 'CREST' on them. At first we thought this was an instruction to hold outspread fingers to the head to imitate the crested cockatoo we'd seen earlier but eventually we realised that it was the equivalent of the 'Hidden Dip' sign used on UK roads. So just a different way of looking at the same thing. Thankfully these subtle changes to the language were easy for us 'pommies' to understand and we didn't make complete fools of ourselves during our time in 'Straya'.

Australia - impressions

What we enjoy and welcome most about foreign travel are the differences, either in the environment itself, the landscape and the man-made structures, or else in the way people have reacted to those differences which over time have given rise to different behaviours and cultures. Today, most of those who live in Australia come from a heritage which is traceable to somewhere else, mostly the UK, which explains why the language and the culture is basically familiar to us. Yet there are things that are notably distinct, behavioural changes, which have proliferated over time and spread to all those who today call themselves Australian.

[What follows here is likely to be seen as biased, not least because we are visiting only a small part of this vast country.]

You don't have to spend long driving here to notice how many cars fit what we assume to be the Australian psyche, something centred around a scenario where as soon as you drive out of town you're in the 'outback', a world of dirt roads and swollen streams where the risk of wildlife jumping out in front of you requires solid lumps of iron known as 'bull bars' attached to the front of your vehicle to bump it aside. It seems that the most common private car is the 'ute', a 4-wheel drive truck equipped with enormous tyres and ideally a snorkel to enable it to cope with driving through deep water. These vehicles are everywhere, their powerful, roaring engines feeding the myth which everyone seems to believe. Because for most Australians it surely is a myth. The dirt roads were paved over years ago and the swollen streams are protected by warning signs as you pass over the bridges. Granted there are still places where kangaroos or other wildlife are quite likely to hop across the highway but for most short journeys this would not be a problem. In a modern world where the car is used for shopping, a trip to the beach or maybe going for a meal out, any small car would suffice but this would not fit in with how Australians seem to see their country. For them it is still big and dangerous, a kanga around every corner just waiting to impale itself on the bonnet, so the massive gas-guzzlers are everywhere and the roads, the car parks and the fuel stations are all sized to accommodate them.

Without difficulty we found the ultimate example to illustrate the many essential features of these vehicles: four doors, fat tyres with flared wheel arches, bull bars with an aerial sticking up at the front, twin snorkels, roll bar, twin spare wheels hanging on the back, roof rack with a tent or an awning, tow hitch, rear storage compartment, air conditioning and of course a roaring exhaust system. Missing any of these features and unless you live in an Australian city you'll likely feel socially inadequate, unable to hold your own against those you feel are better equipped than you.

None of this should be surprising really. On our motorway journey south from Scotland to Bristol we were constantly being overtaken by cars zooming past us in the outside lane, the majority of which were large SUVs, a remarkable number of these having personalised number plates. Something very similar drives the need to own such vehicles and to use them in this way. In London they are known as 'Chelsea Tractors'. In Brisbane itself, so it seemed, many of the utes have also been swapped for large SUVs with personalised number plates.

One other thing about foreign travel is that reality doesn't always line up with expectations; this is just the way of the world. When the trip to Australia was first proposed our thinking was that we'd be faced with temperatures well in excess of those we were leaving behind, and in this at least we were not to be disappointed. Along with this we had in mind that it would be very dry, our previous visit some years ago fitting this model and this also being the prevailing image of Australia portrayed to those of us who live on our side of the world.

Reality turned out to be rather different. One of the first wild walks we went on whilst we were staying with Kate's brother in Cooloola Cove took us to this creek. On our initial visit the water was darkly stained with tannins but flowing fairly gently. Two days later the water level was much higher and the fallen tree we had used before to manoeuvre ourselves across had been swept away downstream. Crossing it again was out of the question. Given the amount of rain falling every day from the moment we arrived this was hardly surprising but it turned out that even the locals were bewildered by the unusual rainfall. The ground around the house was saturated well before we arrived and the heavy showers that fell every day during the first weeks of our holiday added to this. Contrast this with the UK where the news is all about, well, the exceptional rainfall. Is something strange happening to our world?

The Australian heat, though, was well up to our expectations. Had we stayed at home we'd have been in six degrees of heat and lighting the stove every evening to keep ourselves cosy. In Oz we had twenty five degrees each day by ten in the morning, rising well above this most afternoons. We became acclimatised, to an extent, but it is difficult to imagine what Ozzy summer temperatures must feel like. Coping with the heat was what we did but it sapped our energy, our skin being permanently damp from perspiration. The nights gave us little relief unless we chose to use the bedroom air conditioning unit but both this and the enormous ceiling fan produced noise which disturbed our sleep. Well, that and the noises from the outside, the crickets and the frogs, plus the occasional ute driving past.

Australia - the wildlife

'Jet-lag' is the term we use to describe the after effects of moving quickly from one time zone to another distant one. It would have had no meaning before long haul flying became a reality but today it is commonplace and there are many ways that this affects our bodies. The physical consequences of being uncomfortably seated for a prolonged period of time whilst being subjected to constant vibration and the occasional shaking caused by air turbulence will inevitably have an effect on us. The body clock alone can take days to readjust but the strange sensations of vibration coming through my feet after landing did take me by surprise. Then after emerging from our first night of sleep with our hosts, ridiculously early (local time) on the first morning, we got our first sight of the garden birds attracted by our host's feeding regime.

It appears that most things flying things here are brightly coloured and since many are unique to Australia the first thing we have to do is learn all their names. The dingo shown here is not (normally) a garden visitor, nor would he be welcome. We saw this one strolling about in a local park as if he owned the place, which in many ways they do. The Aussie magpie is considerably bigger than what we see at home and has a call that is loud enough to be heard across the world.

This particular chap is reasonably tame as a result of being offered food every day and he begins screaming for attention every morning as soon as he sees someone in the house is awake.

Moving on... 

... these fungal beauties caught our eye. They live on trees in the wooded areas near where we were staying, an area known as 'the bush' ('woods' don't exist here). Eucalyptus trees tower over everything else, their white trunks being devoid of bark and carrying strange zigzag marks made by tiny burrowing creatures.

All this in our first week of the holiday during which we explored the area, the beaches and the sand dunes. This was where we met the goanna and the white crab. The gekko, however, spends his days in the house catching flies and spiders whenever he can. Everything in Australia seems to be in one way or another different from what we are used to back home in Scotland. The wildlife, the climate, the cars, the accent, it is all part of the jet-lag adjusting process.

Australia - the journey

Quite suddenly we find ourselves planning a journey to the other side of the world, to a land where spiders and snakes are best avoided. This (the journey, not the snakes) is because many years ago I married into a widely scattered family, one contingent of which had chosen to live in Australia, the consequence of which is that a family visit entails travelling to the other side of the world.

It turns out that if you live in Scotland you can't just get on a bus and ask the driver to drop you off in Brisbane. Instead it requires advance booking of a seat on an aeroplane which in turn needs to stop and refuel somewhere en route. To organise this you need a willingness to negotiate the many traps and pitfalls that lie in wait for the inexperienced traveller, including negotiating the complications of booking online through an unhelpful website, putting at risk a considerable quantity of money. But fortunately for us we have a son and daughter-in-law who both have considerable expertise in travelling to far away places and when we called them for advice they rather surprisingly said, 'Can we come too?' Before we could catch our breath they had flights booked for all four of us, visas secured and all the required inoculations, leaving us only to make decisions about how many pairs of shorts to take and whether to pack the sandals or wear them.

We were travelling in March, the back end of winter in Scotland, but late summer on the other side of the world, which meant we'd be faced with a temperature adjustment along with the time difference. I wondered whether if we were to seal ourselves away for a week in a heated box with lights programmed to come on to match Australian daylight time (10 hours ahead of GMT) then we'd be fully acclimatised by the time of our departure.  Strangely this idea didn't appeal to my fellow travellers although the most organised amongst us was seen wearing dark glasses at odd times of the day as part of her acclimatisation strategy.

The logistics of packing were riddled with complexity due to the need for us to plan for spending a few days in Bristol where our son Ben and daughter-in-law live, as they were to be driving us to the airport in London. My first packing list had the shorts, t-shirts and sandals we'd need in Australia and list number two had the warmer clothing one might expect to need in Bristol in early spring but each list also contained essentials like socks, underwear and shoes which either would or would not be flying with us. Everything on list one then had to be allocated as either hold or carry-on luggage and weighed carefully. Only when the lists were translated into reality could we leave.

Our drive south to Bristol was exhausting for us due to the rain-spray soaked motorways we had to negotiate plus our unfamiliarity with heavy, fast moving traffic flying down the outside lane. Driving within Bristol itself has many additional hazards for the inexperienced, which is what we are. These come in the form of electric scooters and cargo bikes. It is also a place where lane discipline comes with a set of rules that were completely alien to us, failure to comply with which invokes extreme road rage.

In Bristol we parked our campervan in the front garden where we slept for a few days before we all set off to spend our final night in a London hotel so as to catch the early flight the following day.

This is us arriving at Gatwick and from here on we were entirely at the mercy of our son and daughter-in-law, to whom all this is second nature.

The long journey to Australia involved a stopover in Doha, the capital of Qatar, where the airport terminal looked more like nature reserve.

We then climbed aboard an enormous plane in which we sat for many hours, being shaken about and fed from time to time, an experience to be endured then forgotten. Some twelve hours later we landed and were met at Brisbane airport by Kate's brother, Jim, who drove us for another three hours to his home in Cooloola Cove. By this stage our bodies were suffering from being cooped up for so long and my memories of the remainder of that day are non existent.

Shrimper corner

This entry is not fishing related in any way. Instead it concerns our small sailing boat which was designed and built in deepest Cornwall (she is a Cornish Shrimper; there's a clue there). She is called Eun na Mara which is Gaelic for 'bird of the sea'. Given her origin it is hardly surprising that there are very few sailing in Scottish waters. Tarbert marina had just the one, ours, until a few months ago when suddenly a second one appeared, as if by magic.

She is a little younger than ours, has a black hull, is moored close by and is called Loup.

As soon as we spotted her we were keen to make contact with the owners so we could exchange shrimpy tales, discover our boats' little differences and examine the modifications, these things all being important to a Shrimper owner. It turns out, however, that we share far more than an identical boat with Loup's owners as not only do they reside in our village but they have recently moved into a house on our street just a few doors away from us. Stranger still is the fact that their house is of the same size and construction as ours and their garden, well it makes ours look quite tame by comparison. They have a jungle to cope with and will be facing similar problems to those we had when we first moved in.

The Shrimper is a boat designed for two people to sail and even sleep in overnight but now that ours is so conveniently berthed within sight of our house I have been tempted to take her out on my own from time to time. I have taken for granted her various foibles and also the inevitable consequences of having a gaff rig - not able to compete with a more modern Bermudan rigged boat when sailing upwind. It was only after comparing notes with the owners of our companion boat, however, that I realised something more serious might be affecting Eun na Mara's sailing performance. Shrimpers have a heavy iron keel plate which, when lowered from within the boat, adds a stronger righting moment as well as resisting leeway when sailing to windward. [If this is starting to get too technical then please feel free to jump ahead or else take a short walk and come back later.] When raised the plate is contained within a watertight box inside the boat where it is supported by a pivot bolt so the rear part can be lowered on a wire. The problem with ours is that the plate gets stuck before it is fully lowered, something we only discovered from experiments on Loup, whose keel plate works as it should. 

It is a well known fact in sailing circles that observing what is actually happening beneath one's boat is not easy (it is a hidden world) so this rather uninteresting picture, taken with a waterproof camera fastened to the end of a selfie stick, is something to be treasured. What it shows in essence is that our boat has a problem as only a small fraction of the keel plate is showing beneath the hull.

This is what it should look like when fully lowered.

In order to try to fix the problem we thought it might be possible to dive beneath the boat, give keel plate a tug from underneath to encourage it to drop down, then bob back up to the surface before running out of air. This became Plan A. Wet-suited, I clamber over the side of the boat and slide underneath to grab hold of the small protruding piece of iron. Now upside down, my feet braced against the bottom of the hull, I heave away with all my strength but nothing moves. I soon realise that this is something that can only be fixed with the boat out of the water so I focus on the bobbing up bit but emerge from under the water looking like a zombie as I'm covered in blue antifouling paint, the self eroding hull coating having transferred itself to me as I slithered about down below.

Plan B. Arrangements are made with another local boatyard for our boat to be hoisted into the air (not her natural element) so the faulty keel can be extracted (it only comes out from beneath) and the problem fixed. The journey to the boatyard, however, is necessarily by road since the Crinan Canal which connects us with the other yard is closed for maintenance during the winter months. This means we must first get the boat back onto her trailer, the one that spent last summer languishing in our garage whilst new suspension units were fitted, so we take advantage of the crane organised as part of our marina's end of season boat liftout, which solved that problem. But once secured safely on her trailer it turns out things are a little more complicated because a massive rain storm passing over Scotland several weeks before had caused landslips in several places, the largest of which had completely blocked the road between our home and the boatyard we were planning to drive to. Alternative routes would all involve a lengthy detour along narrow single track roads, totally unsuitable when pulling a loaded trailer. So plan B is on hold.

Over the following weeks, road repair crews begin to remove thousands of tons of rock and rubble from the blocked road. Simultaneously an alternative route is constructed which bypasses the mountain from which the rockfall came by using an existing forest track, previously only used for extracting timber, and an additional piece of land bought from a local farmer. Remarkably, quicker than anyone had expected, the new road, which is far enough from the original rockfall to be safe from further unstable debris above the main road, was announced as being open to traffic, albeit with a one way traffic flow in place. But now something else intervened... Christmas. The boatyard workshop staff are given a two week break so our trip is on hold until the new year.

Finally the day arrives when we hitch up the trailer, slide under the height bar which protects the marina car park from vehicles only slightly higher than ours, and drive north.

Everything goes smoothly and on arrival at the boatyard Eun na Mara is lifted into the air so we can see what is going on with the keel. Once the inevitable layers of barnacles and worm casts are pressure-washed off the problem becomes apparent. From inside and from underneath the boat some distortion to the side of the keel box can be seen and it is this that is preventing the keel from dropping. Fixing this is not going to be an easy job and the busy boatyard cannot begin work for some months yet so once again we must wait.

How did this damage happen? The answer to this question lies with the internal ballast used in the construction of these boats; small pieces of iron (shot) bonded into the floor on either side of the keel box. At some point long ago seawater has got into this on one side and caused the iron to rust. This in turn caused the ballast to swell which then put pressure on the side of the keel box, distorting it until the keel plate could no longer swing down. The solution now is to chip away the swollen internal ballast (not easy) so the keel box side can be forced back into shape and fixed in this position. I am able to do some of the work by chipping and grinding away from inside but the final repair will require access from underneath the boat, which is impossible whilst she sits on her trailer. Hence we still need the services of the boatyard and must be patient. We tow her back home and wait for the call from the yard.

A few weeks later we are watching enviously as the boats in our local marina are craned back into the water so they can go off sailing.

Music

I come from an era when many homes, including mine, had a piano. This wasn't necessarily because anyone who lived there had a particular musical talent; for many it was simply an item of furniture that was expected in your home and missed if it was not there. Its function was not really to entertain others. More likely it was seen as somewhere to sit and contemplate, to play a simple tune to delight the ears of one's children perhaps, to see if they might show an interest, or maybe playing carols at Christmas time. Interestingly, and unlike with some other instruments, a pianist can look directly at their hands on the keys whilst playing, keys which are laid out in such a logical fashion that even after moving on to a different instrument the piano keyboard will still serve as a mental reference.

I can recall going to piano lessons (which I hated) from an early age and despite having no interest in playing another instrument for many years afterwards, some of what I learnt must have stuck because today I can still read music. (This is the modern system of lines and dots first created by Christian monks to try to standardise their worship.) In later life various situations have prompted me to pick up and play different instruments, starting with a tin whistle and more recently playing a concertina. When I look back on how this has come about I find it quite hard to believe that those few short years as a child sitting once a week at a piano with my scary tutor beside me (slapping my knuckles with a ruler when I got it wrong) could have resulted in anything useful sticking with me. But it clearly did.

Learning to play the concertina on my own, with no tuition, has been something of a challenge but it has been one that I have been motivated to endure without really considering what it might lead to were I ever to become competent enough to share my playing with others. It is a strange instrument to master. Mine has thirty buttons, each of which produces two different notes, depending on whether I am squeezing or pulling. A choice of alternative fingerings are possible for many tunes and the position of each note, although it seems logical to me now, is completely different from the logic of the piano keyboard. Fortunately , unlike the piano, the concertina is conveniently portable, which I like, and the sound seems to fit in well when played alongside guitar and fiddle players. Playing music is a social thing but since moving to Scotland this is something I have missed... until we moved house and I teamed up with some like minded friends with whom I can share my mistakes.

This is what a bunch of musical unprofessionals look like in action. Next to me is young girl playing her clarsach, a small harp, and on the other side is a lad called Aidan playing an accordion almost as big as himself.

So this is the end result of all those childhood music lessons - me sitting in a cafe in Scotland squeezing a small box to make some squeaky noises. I really don't think this is what my piano teacher had in mind for me. She'd probably regard me as a failure but I think of it as a challenge which I enjoy ever more as my level of competency improves.

Out with the old

Our living room was always going to be a big decorating project for us. Every surface needed attention, changing from the before - patterned, papered walls which we hated, a faded painted ceiling and a hideous, ancient, patterned carpet on the floor - to the after, which is our own taste in plain coloured walls, a freshly painted ceiling, the mural across one wall and our own choice of floor, which is not carpet. Having finished work on our lovely new kitchen and with our energies recharged, we always knew that decorating the living room would follow.

Stripping the wallpaper from the walls revealed a host of patchwork repairs that needed covering up but logic dictates that we start at the top, the ceiling, so white paint is rolled on, splashing everything beneath with fine droplets, which we knew would happen and was why we started at the top. Skirting boards around the room are given a fresh coat of paint after peeling back the carpet, the folded over edges of which have been nailed firmly down to the floor, a strange way to fasten a carpet. This reveals some gaps through which cold draughts come whistling up from under the house when it is blowing hard outside, not what we need, so thick beads of sealant are applied to seal the gaps and make the room more airtight. This will likely need more attention when our floor covering goes down, the finishing touch.

Walls are next, the mural (which has already been revealed here) is followed by fresh but plain coloured wallpaper around the rest of the room. There are, as ever, some awkward bits - around the edges of the windows where odd shapes require tricky trimming - but generally the work progresses smoothly over several days. Whilst working on the job the focus tends to be on the next piece, or the next cut, and it is only when the last piece goes up that we suddenly stand back and admire what we have created. So long as one's eyes are blind to the still carpeted floor we have a room that reflects our tastes, simple and bold.

Christmas intervenes with our son Ben and his wife Naomi coming to stay but without their cat, Toby, who is not a good traveller.

Although left home alone we can keep watch on him via a live video link and he seems perfectly relaxed as he wanders about the house and garden.

After Christmas we collect our laminate flooring from the shop then have to carry the ten heavy boxes up the steps to our front door, a task that leaves us gasping for breath and trembly at the knees, so we sit down and do some planning. The strategy for laying the floor involves shuffling large items of furniture across from one side of the room to the other then back again as we lay the flooring in rows across the room. The (horrible) carpet must first be lifted to reveal what we have never seen, the wooden floor boards below, but this can be done in sections with the furniture then being lifted back onto each completed section of the new floor. A small crane might help with this but in its absence muscle power will have to do. Just like with the kitchen rebuild once we start the job we must cope with disruption to our normal pattern of day to day behaviour so the sooner we can finish the better. 

The end of the second day of laying the new laminate flooring sees a sizeable chunk finished. We now have a sequence of moves worked out for each line of planks running across the room from end to end so in theory the rest of the job should go smoothly. As each section of carpet is sliced from end to end, rolled up and taken away it reveals a horrible mix of underlay, some of which has perished into black crumbs and then in another area there's a thick woolly material that looks older than the house itself. The only element that is consistent across the room is that each piece of underlay is nailed to the floor with long carpet tacks or staples all of which must be prized free before work can begin. As one might expect, laying a new floor is pretty tough on the knees too. Nothing is ever simple.

On the positive side the history of the house hidden under the old carpet that is revealed to us is like being on an archeological dig.

Strange scribblings on the floor boards like these must have had some meaning to someone years ago, just as a cave painting would have done to a neolithic hunter. We can only guess at what the writer was trying to tell us. But finally the last plank is laid, the rolled up slices of the hated carpet are carried off to the tip and the history beneath our feet is once again hidden from view. All that remains is to fix an edging trim around the room to cover the expansion gap needed on all laminate floors but visually the job is done. Every last piece of that hated carpet has become landfill.

Looking over the transformation we have brought about it suddenly hits us. Unexpectedly we now have an almost perfect carbon copy of the living room we created in our Carradale home. Some things in life are just not worth changing.

Seagulls & mice

We are well aware that we don't always follow convention when it comes to home decor. Nobody has actually told us this to our faces but we have noticed the expressions of horror, quickly hidden away, on the faces of those visiting.

When we started looking online for wallpaper to put up in our living room we were drawn to something we had tried in our previous house, a mural. For a time we considered painting the wall, something exciting, a work of art that might be visible from the street, but in the end we settled for this sunrise and its five seagulls, made to measure from strips of wallpaper. It is both unusual and quite dramatic, something more usually associated with a public space and therefore unexpected in a home setting. We do not follow convention. For the rest of the living room we have gone for plain colours and finally, at 1205 on Wednesday 13th December, we finished fixing the last strip of wallpaper. A big tick, job done.

Winter is now upon us and a recent cold spell made us grateful for the extra insulation we have had placed around and beneath the house during the last year. This even includes the new central heating pipes running under the floor which have foam tubes around them to keep the heat in. But the question is, for how much longer? The first thing we noticed were the tiny granules of insulation material scattered about in the undercroft (or basement, as some would call it), a clear indication that we have some small visitors. Rodents like field mice will try to find somewhere warmer to hang out in winter, something we would not object to but for their nest building habits. Having gone to such lengths to insulate our rather leaky house it sort of rubs us up the wrong way to think that it is being chewed up to keep a few mice cosy, so eventually we decided to resort to setting traps for them. We chose a humane solution, one that merely captures the creatures inside a metal cage, but sadly the first tiny rodent we found had passed away by morning after eating all the bait inside the cage. (We like to think he was rather elderly and suffered a heart failure.) But on a positive note it did save us the job of carrying him somewhere far away to release him. He was not, however, the field mouse we had expected. This little fellow was a vole, a creature that does not normally make a habit of moving into a house, or so we are told.

The following morning vole No.2 was shuffling around inside one of the traps and this brought into play our release strategy. A ten minute walk away from us we have a wild area, a bit of rainforest woodland, where we like to think a vole will be able to live a long and fruitful life. Here, the cage door is opened and, after a few seconds deep thought, No.2 scuttled off into the wood, disappearing from sight as he dived under the fallen leaves.

The next day this little fellow was tempted into the trap, a field mouse. Again we took him for a walk and opened up the cage on the ground, the doorway to his new world.  Just how many of these tiny creatures will be lured into our baited traps only time will tell. It turns out that they don't like peanut butter - who'd have thought it! - but each one caught means that our underfloor pipe insulation survives a little longer. If we had a dog, which we don't, we'd be taking it for a walk every morning, like most owners do. Rehoming the rodents by walking them to somewhere wild is our own version of this. These tiny creatures may prefer to be inside someone's house in cold weather and the woodland may present something of a challenge to them. For this I apologise profusely but I'm sure they would do the same in my position.