Monday 9 January 2023
It’s Monday morning, 07:59, still 37 minutes until sunrise but the moon is doing a good job of making it seem lighter. It is not raining and the trees I can see opposite the window appear not to be swaying vigorously. Today needs to be a largely desk-based day but we are waging war on two forces at the moment, mice (we think/assume) and water ingress. Incidentally, all is good where the heating is concerned, though I don’t think either of us will ever completely take the electric boiler and hot radiators for granted.
The mice (for now, we’re going to assume it’s ‘just’ mice but once or twice it’s sounded like a bear is in the roof). We never heard a patter, a scratch, a squeak, nothing, until the plumber came and spent the day in and out of an attic. Don’t for a minute think I am blaming the plumber for whatever he unleashed; he gave us hot radiators, for which we are extremely grateful, and I would rather have hot radiators than no mice.
Then we heard the patter of little paws (and the occasional heavier paws – the bear), but only briefly and only ever for a short period of time. We heard patters above the kitchen, above the hallway, possibly once or twice above the living room and above the bedroom. But no sign of mouse droppings in the house. Until I realised that the almost daily “hahahahaha, wonder what that is, it looks like a mouse poo, but, hahahahaha, it’s only one so it must be a bit of food that looks like a mouse dropping, hahahaha” phenomenon was not a poo-shaped crumb. This is called denial and it came into question when small shards of plastic began to accompany the one, sometimes two, droppings next to the oven. We appear to have a mouse desperate to gain entry to the house via a small bathroom-type plastic fan almost above the hob. It has chewed a fair bit of plastic. Does it sound mean that every morning, I now put the fan on, just in case? It’s best not to overthink the possibilities.
Anyway, we think that is one mouse. Meanwhile, for the past few days, other than one mouse sounding like it had got into the roof space, Chris banging on the ceiling and it making a run for it out another entry/exit point, then quiet, there seems to not be much going on in mouse-in-house world.
However, we have a set of three wildlife cameras. One is currently set up every night in Chris’s study, the one room that appears to sometimes have a few droppings, but only ever a few and only ever in the same area, near a seemingly blocked-up fireplace. Unsurprisingly, the only night we found a few more droppings was the night we didn’t turn the camera back on after the exciting daily SD card check. So far, the camera has just captured Chris closing and opening the curtains.
This morning, I checked the paper I have started leaving beneath the extractor fan by the hob and there were no droppings, though I have yet to do a thorough search in case one bounced off the paper or the mouse got clever and directed its calling card away from the paper. We have a sonar mouse scarer thing (a much-recommended one that has, amazingly, cleared my mum’s garage of mice, her having tried traps and other luring and repelling devices) that the extractor fan mouse appears to be immune to. But, last night, we sprayed mouse deterrent spray around the extractor fan. It’s all natural oils (peppermint, geraniol and other strong oils), non-toxic and actually kind of pleasant, though strong. Anyway, hopefully extractor-fan-mouse hates it and has gone away. I know, unlikely. If all this fails, we’re calling Dead Cert in Selkirk, for the name alone.
As for the water ingress, that’s a new, developing problem. It’s around the inner part of a kitchen window (I say ‘inner’ because it’s the inside frame of the very thick wall) and the dampness has revealed that paint has probably covered over a historic damp area. Outside, the guttering isn’t great in that area and it may also be around the area that the bear-mouse was heard running out the other night when Chris’s ceiling-banging seemed to scare it out. I was noting the lack of rain earlier because I know we should get the step ladders out to have a look at the roof around there.
I had two walks yesterday, one being my garden patrol, the other, shortly before sunset, a short way up the road. I can’t imagine ever tiring of the views around here, it always looks different.
