Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
We had a sense that we had finally started on something and as we watched Butard wander
slowly off to his van, totally unfazed by the howling gale that was buffeting the rest of us,
Natalie and I looked at each other, pleased to be making progress, however slow that might
be.
'Right, I'm going to make a dash for it,' I said, intending to go back to the warm indoors.
'I'll be along later,' Natalie said, tightening up her scarf and summoning up her 'outdoorsy'
courage.
Despite her flu Natalie alone was venturing outside in the bad weather, arguing reasonably
that 'poo won't clear itself' and feeling that the horses could do with the company. The rest
of us, though sheepishly in admiration of her fortitude, were staying indoors doing indoor
things like guessing which cat had made that awful stench, running a book on which piece of
furniture Pierrot would sexually assault next, moving Natalie's cushions about to see if she
noticed and buying stuff we used to own anyway off eBay. We were bored and running out
of patience, family goodwill and firewood, with winter showing little sign of clearing off just
yet.
There was one faint sign of a slight thaw but it was an unwelcome one: the moles were back.
The mole, Latin name
Talpa europaea
, known colloquially as 'total and utter bastard', has
had a pretty soft ride of it if you ask me. There's the sweet and cuddly mole from
The Wind
in the Willows,
the sweet and cuddly Morocco Mole from
Secret Squirrel
and, er, the sweet
and cuddly mole from
Secret Squirrel
; only recently, thanks to
South Park, G-Force
and
The
Incredibles
, is the whole 'moles are OK' fallacy being re-addressed. And it's about time too.
We have one sizeable piece of lawn that isn't given over to the horses and, because the ground
had thawed enough for the moles to do their thing, it was beginning to look like it had been
attacked by drunken
Time Team
researchers.
I despise moles.
Since we'd been here I had tried a variety of ways to get rid of them, ranging from the highly
ineffectual to the 'box said it was poison, but it's clearly an aphrodisiac' variety. As far as re-
moving the pests from the property went, I had run the full gamut of failure. They mock me
with their tunnelling, sticking two fingers up to the purity of the Englishman and his lawn;
and here they were, back again, and having a bloody Mardi Gras at my expense.
We've sought advice about them, but apparently they're the 'yeast infection' of the animal
world, only ever temporarily removed. There is a local artisan whose entire business is de-
voted to mole extermination, which gives you some idea of the scale of the problem; he's
a haunted individual, a sallow, sunken-eyed chain smoker who clearly started out with high
ideals of laying the mole to waste, but who has been beaten down to a mere shell of a man by
their sheer relentlessness. 'I could get rid of them,' he said, surveying the wasteland that was
my lawn, 'but they'll be back.' He turned to me, tears in his eyes. 'They'll always be back.'
