Things I did today: Outwitted a mole.

[Pat H]

For the last few weeks I have been stalking the resident mole.

Every couple of days I would set the scissor traps and every couple of days the traps would have been sprung, but with no sign of the little git.



And as the little bugger systematically rotavated my lawn, I became more and more incensed.

Thoughts turned to all the different possible ways of killing.

Could I get hold of some of the (now illegal) poisons?

I considered putting the garden hose down one of the tunnels and trying to drown it.

I even pondered putting a gallon of old engine oil down one of the holes to see if it might give the little bd cancer.

First thing in the morning you could see him working as soil trickled off the top of the latest molehill.

I would go out armed with a spade, and creep up on him, intent on beating him to death, but he would always hear me coming and creep off into the bowels of the earth, leaving me standing on the lawn in my slippers, swearing and waving my spade around like some kind of nobhead.

But this morning was different. I was enjoying a lie in when Mrs H spotted him working, so out I went. Pyjamas, slippers and spade.

With skills honed by weeks of stalking, I crept up on him as he was working on his latest hill. Then, faster than a speeding bullet, plunged the spade into the ground infront of the hill, and deftly flicked the sod over. Percy Thrower would have been impressed.

So suddenly there he was, lying on the lawn wondering what the fk had just happened.

I raised my spade over my head and was about to bring it down like the fist of an angry god to dispatch the evil creature.

Then, in a fleeting moment of weakness, I looked down at the helpless tiny blind creature blinking on the grass.

Thoughts of beating it to death passed from my mind and I carefully scooped him up, placed him in a bowl in the kitchen and took a photo for posterity.

Then, like some sort of soft mincing vegetarian, I drove him half a mile to some local woodland and set him free.

I might walk down there later to see how he is settling in.

[Pat H]

NDA said:

Good post. Nice looking lawn too - what's beyond the low hedging?

I am told that there is a herb garden and vegetable patch.

But the garden is a strange and foreign land to me, strictly the preserve of Mrs H, in the same way that the garage is my members only gentlemans' club which she enters at her peril.

I am occasionally called to deal with unwanted creatures.

The last time resulted in us adopting an abandoned rabbit which we still have almost a year later, eating us out of house and home.