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.