In retrospect, it had all been going so well

“Don’t worry about me,” I said, “I’ll just sleep downstairs.”
 
It was a genuine offer, and only partly out of self-interest. Mrs. Ottawacker’s blanket and sheet theft has been reaching legendary proportions of late, and I needed to sleep. So, admittedly, did she: apparently, I snore. (That is, not to put too fine a point on it, bollocks: to snore, you need to be able to be sleep, not engaged in a constant struggle with an invisible entity that is intent on wrapping itself up in a self-made cocoon of sheet, comforter and blanket.) Anyway, we made the decision and off, at 10.30, went Mrs. Ottawacker to bed. Having tried and failed to stay awake in order to watch Léa Slimani attempt an interview of Michel Drucker on Quelle Soirée!, I went down to the basement bedroom ten minutes later. I read a couple of pages of Slow Horses, then fell asleep. Then, at 1 a.m., I was wide awake. Something was scratching in the vents – and that could only mean one thing: we had mice again.
 
I got up, fetched a torch from the kitchen, and then went into the furnace room to see if I could catch sight of the little buggers. I couldn’t – it or they were still in the vents. (The vents lead out to the front garden; they are well protected with wire mesh and heavy-duty plastic and machine-gun turrets, but the little buggers still manage to get in. For some reason, once they are in, they can’t get back out.) There was silence. So, I went back to bed. In hindsight, I should just have let the cats into the basement and gone to sleep upstairs, but the mundanity of 10 minutes of Michel Drucker interview had had a stultifying effect on my brain. Over the next 5-6 hours, I was up every hour, raging into the furnace room, like Basil Fawlty about to attack a mini. Of course, I saw nothing, and was completely primed to wake up at the slightest noise. The last time I remember looking at the clock was 5 a.m., and the next thing I knew, Ottawacker Jr. was in the basement asking me how I had slept. “Oh,” he said, “while I remember, there’s a mouse in the trap.”
 
Now, before you get upset, I don’t kill mice. (I don’t kill spiders, I don’t kill wasps and I don’t kill errant flies that wander into the house in mid-summer; there’s no need – so, there is no way I am going to kill a mouse.) We have a small humane trap that we prime with a dollop of peanut butter. It works brilliantly. (In fact, I am not sure it doesn’t work so well as to attract the mice into the house in the first place.) Anyway, when I finally dragged myself out of bed, I went into the furnace room and there it was, a rather large mouse, sitting in the middle of the trap eating the peanut butter. I went to make myself coffee, had a shower, and then drove to a park on the other side of the river to release it near a stand of trees.
 
After that, I realised I hadn’t posted the package of photocopies for my UK passport application yet, so went off to the local post office. It had to go registered mail – containing as it did my old passport and a photocopy of my Canadian passport. Have a guess how much it cost. $41. Forty-one dollars, to send a small package of documents via Canada Post to the UK. Insane. Is this what it is going to be like now? I mean, the actual application was quick and easy and over in 10 minutes. But this – wow: I was a bit upset at paying £132 for the passport, but this seems a whole new level of unreasonableness.
 
I headed back and decided to take out my frustration on the translation I am currently doing. It went smoothly enough – and by the time it came to dinner time, I was just about able to cook chicken in the tajine. Ottawacker Jr. was making scones for his school’s pot-luck “A taste of the world” evening tomorrow, so I watched with some concern as he added in lemon zest to a chocolate muffin (when, pre-bedtime, I had a taste of a stray one, it was surprisingly excellent; he got the idea from a YouTube video. Whatever happened to books and Mrs. Beeton?)
 
To finish the series, Mrs. Ottawacker and I watched the third part of a BBC documentary on Julius Caesar and the fall of Roman democracy. There were some weird gaps in it – there had been a big build-up of the rivalry between Caesar and Cato, which led to a civil war. In Episode 2, we ended as Caesar was deciding whether or not to cross the Rubicon; Episode 3 started three years later and there was no further mention of Cato – but it was very interesting, even if the directors tried too hard to underscore the similarities with Trump and the dangers of populism in the 21st century – without specifically saying this. The problem with making allusions to people you think are too stupid to get your allusions is that you overdo the alluding. It’s easier to say it outright.