Right...... out you go.

In the little hardware store, the mice munching, head chopping, savage squashing killer traps were 70cents, but the kind comfy cheese ridden cages that promised some sort of future existence for the little gnawing nuppers cost twenty quid. Argch, we quipped collectively; if we bought the mean trappers, we could eat a nice dinner. If we had hearts, it'd be pasta, again. But as today's Blip does show, we had too much sympathy for those pesty little scatchy buggers, so the divine hotel it was.

And so the routine begins. We put cheese on a little hook that entices them into our clever little contraption. We leave the bus for an hour or two, milling about the village mainly looking at mountains. Meanwhile, they chew a little bit on the best dinner they've ever seen. That releases a catch which is attached to their feed, resulting in a slamming closed trap door, locking their caught busted bottoms into our cage with no way out. So every time we returned back to see how our little problem was getting on, there stood sighing in the corner, mouse after mouse - one by one - being lured in to our trickery.

I'll hold my hands up - sleepless nights of convincing myself that I'm going to wake up with multiple wriggling vermin caught up in my hair has got the better of me, I'm now petrified of mice. Maybe the way they move, maybe the way they look at you out the side of their head, knowing full well they can hide + outrun you at any given moment. Either way, they've got one on me.

But still that night, despite the catchings that we'd delivered a mile down the road into a bush by the river; the scratching + clawing continued, with a bunch of moments of waking up to the sound of caged mice who'd been caught alongside the continuations of surround sound nibblings and gnawings behind the headboard, under the bed, in the cupboards, everywhere : ........ u u u u u r g h ......