Mrs Down's Diary - January 20

I was puzzled. Hadn't I just washed the floor down? A repetitive task with the kitchen being such a through fare in the house and Pip, our Labrador pup, being such an enthusiastic purveyor of muck and blather.

As I studied the pile, a shower of dust and grit added to it, this time settling on me as well as the floor. And it was coming from a small gap in the beamed ceiling, plus sound effects. Scrabble, scrabble, scrabble. We have a visitor. Probably a mouse.

The hole in the beams has now been sealed up temporarily with plaster, but the sound effects remain. They come from somewhere in the gap between the kitchen celling and our bedroom floor. But where? I think a mouse, or mice, may be climbing up through the old boiler house attached to the back of the house. On that I hang any number of bird feeders, and we have had problems before with mice and rats attracted to the spilt seed.

The whole exercise has put John in killing mode. We have mouse traps, mouse poison and, just to make sure, rat traps and poison too, to outwit the intruder. He is currently frustrated at his self-imposed,but may soon be formal, shooting ban.

He doesn't consider it sporting to shoot game birds in this severe weather, and so he and his friends have placed an arbitrary ban on themselves for the moment. By the time this is published things may have changed, but at the moment however he is driven into having a mouse as his chief quarry

Snow and ice are giving us, as the rest of the country, a lot of problems. The sheep can't find any grazing so they need to be taken hay and to eat. The cattle require the most complicated shuttle system to allow all of them access to the one water trough that remains frost free.

All the other drinkers and pipes in the yards are frozen. The cows have to be shut into the silage area so the bullocks can be brought through, then the bullocks have to be herded back ( riotous) so that the heifers can come to the trough.

Then that skittish lot have to be persuaded to return so that the suckler herd can drink next. This takes several hours, twice a day. And no let up in sight.

John has also been engaged in his regular requests for a pull out of various hedgerows around the village that foolhardy drivers have entered at speed. Not one, of the five cars and their drivers that he has pulled out have returned with a thank you. All seem to expect it as a service.

It's not us who creates the conditions, and its not even our hedges that they are driving into. Not a road or lane has been gritted within three miles of the farm.