Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Another expert suggested explosives, at which point you are probably thinking to yourselves
that that sounds a bit drastic, which it is. But who hasn't wanted to play with explosives at
some point? I for one couldn't wait. Obviously, there are certain safety measures that have to
be observed, but none of them really ruin the fun; keep the kids indoors, animals on leads,
don't get blottoed on local wine before you rig it all up etc. I've found that it all adds to the
excitement of the exercise really.
I unearthed a tunnel, placed the explosive at the mouth of it, primed it like David Niven in
Guns of Navarone
, and from the safety of the lounge and with binoculars at the ready, waited.
Boom! A small discharge of soil went flying into the air! 'Haha!' I shouted. 'Death to moles!
Victory is mine!' and then I saw a tunnel being made in double quick time away from the
supposed death charge, the mole playing Roadrunner to my bested Wile E. Coyote. I laid an-
other, and then another - all with the same ineffectual result. Six bloody charges I laid in one
afternoon and the mole was still there at the end of the day, burrowing away just below the
surface, unharmed, unfazed and utterly superior. Between us we had completely destroyed
the garden; it looked like a World War One battlefield. It is the same dance every year and it
doesn't matter what I try, my defeat is inevitable.
We got off on the wrong foot you see.
Before we had the horses, we just had a great expanse of land that constantly needed mow-
ing and that meant the dreaded
tondeuse,
the sit-down mower from hell. The final indignity
occurred one spring when I was once again reluctantly mowing the field. As I went under a
fruit tree one of the front wheels went down a mole tunnel and bounced back up throwing me
into the air. My head hit a branch whereupon my headphones got tangled up and trapped, I
was yanked from the mower onto the ground, one half of my headphones still on my head, the
other half dangling mockingly from the tree. The mower continued on its merry way, clearly
better at the job unencumbered by me. I chased after it, turned it off and never got on the
bloody thing again. Maybe I was a bit concussed but I swear I could hear moles laughing.
I can't even argue that the moles could make the horses lame with their indiscriminate bur-
rowing because, and I just cannot fathom this out, they don't go in the horses' field! Whether
they have come to some kind of arrangement I don't know, but the moles stick to the lawn
and Junior and Ultime have no fear of injury.
The moles also had allies in their campaign of terrorism - the cats. I don't know what I ex-
pected from cats, but outright disobedience is something I just cannot tolerate. I don't put up
with it in audiences, children, mechanical objects or cravats, but I was finding that cats op-
erate on a whole other level of nihilism and we were beginning to clash. The idea of turning
Flame and Vespa into house cats had presented its own problems. Firstly they liked going
out and secondly they were acting like they owned the bloody place whenever they were in-
side. I had set up a nice quiet little corner for myself, built a desk, bought a pen tidy, etc. but
the place was now virtually unusable as Vespa insisted on ambushing me from the adjacent
