The perils of going to the toilet at night....

The previous blog told how we were creating a second B&B room by merging a couple of rooms, both of which were in a poor state of repair.

Running alongside this work we are also tackling three other issues, firstly we have had to raise the height of a section of the landing.This is because approximately 1' outside our bedroom door the landing has an unexpected step down, which is even more unexpected when getting up at 2am in a groggy sleepy haze to go for a wiz. The danger is further enhanced by the fact that the direction you tend to fall is towards the top of the precipitous staircase with nothing to stop you tumbling down the flight in true Eddie The Eagle style.














There was further disorientation at the stairs edge because the previous owner had strategically hung a full length curtain right on the edge completely hiding the fact that you were falling towards imminent death. Since we were also about to re-position the new guest room's door on the edge too we felt (after getting the Building Regs. office agreement) that we should level this anomaly.



Secondly we needed a new bathroom as we had sacrificed ours nearly 2 years ago to allow the first B&B room to be en-suite. This was an inconvenience (if you pardon the pun) but if we were serious about making this new venture work it was a sacrifice that we had to make. So we would take our showers or baths between bookings in either the B&B or the Holiday cottage's showers. When we had guests our loo was the downstairs cloakroom's. Of course the whole affair at the top of the stairs just made for an added adrenalin rush when going in the middle of the night and over the last few years we can only thank God that neither of us ended up in a heap at the bottom of the stairs, which was even more probable as the cat has sometimes taken to sitting on the last step just to present us with one more challenge!

However Phase 3 was now upon us and the grand design was to allow for a new bathroom to be created on the landing by stealing a little bit of space from one of the smaller bedrooms... Hooorraaaaa!

To achieve this we would push this wall back to the first black beam in the ceiling making the door thinner and the wall slightly longer.  Then that extra space could be used to facilitate space for a reasonably sized shower (see the plans on the previous blog).





This next picture shows the remainder of the landing seen from the opposite direction and we would then build a new wall, utilising an existing door from the old Study. The wall would run from the left side of the door in the picture creating a long thin corridor this side and enough space to allow for a toilet and a sink within the new room. We both felt that after 2 years we deserved to treat ourselves to a bathroom of our own.. Lets call it a Christmas present to ourselves, ahhh how the other half live eh?

Once again all of this would require a huge amount of work from our builder, plumber and electrician, oh and decorating by us too.
I had to plan where every fitting, fixing and waste pipe would run to allow for this plan to work. We also sought advice from the Building Regulations officers.
The soil pipe for this room would be fairly straight forward as it could just poke through the exterior wall and drop down to a nearby sewer pipe (although a new route to a man hole would need to be dug out).
The main issues here are the facts that the exterior wall is over 15 inches thick and made of flint. Also the patio has been laid on a solid concrete bed some 8 inches thick! You could park a bloody tank on it.



However the en-suite soil pipe is a whole different problem as the room lays dead centre of the house. My cunning plan here is to drop it under the floor and through a wall which would bring it out into the corner of the downstairs cloakroom where it could join up with that toilets waste pipe. This seemed a good idea (and in truth it was the only logical solution) but it would entail the builder removing the downstairs toilet, digging up the cloakroom's floor and laying a new soil pipe junction beneath it.

This picture shows how much floor had to be torn up in the cloakroom. The toilet removed and the new pipe connection set in the corner to receive the loo poo from the en-suite above.

Once again there was a thick concrete floor which was a shame because it had been laid directly on top of some nice clay tiles as this photo shows.

Although directly underneath that was clay soil and the concrete was laid, probably out of necessity, with a plastic sheet damp course. The hole in the wall is caused by the damp clay's, rising damp.


The dining room is likely to be of similar construction and on a humid day last summer the coldness of the underlying soil caused the tiled floor to be really cool which then formed condensation to cover the whole floor. It was really strange to see this film of moisture appear and when you mopped it up it just magically re-appeared. Fortunately this has only happened the once.


So that was the story of what we had planned for Phase 3 of The Old Bakery's renovations. The next few blogs will talk of the trial and tribulations in putting the supposed perfect plan into place. It is a story of blood, sweat, tears, some cursing.... no, a lot of cursing and near the conclusion possibly, yes just possibly some tethers being found to be nearing their ends!


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Something that did not go uncommented upon by the B&Q staff as we went through the tills with three toilets...

Now let me tell you a a little bit more about what we pretentiously call "Phase 3" of The Old Bakery's renovations. I'll start at the beginning and break the last 3 months work down into manageable blogs over the next few weeks (well as small as I can make my blogs, which generally ramble up to essay status before I realise it).

                                                  THE PLAN..... (Phase 3)

The objective of this final stage of our renovations was to upgrade another bedroom to a B&B standard instantly doubling our capacity to take in guests. I say instantly but that would be misleading as the project over run a little bit. That is we shut the B&B down in October for 5 weeks and we have still not completed all the works as of today the 14th of December! However we can see the light at the end of the tunnel and we have been running the B&B operation again since early November having accommodated guests for some 21 nights since then.

Whilst the new room has had one couple stay in it there were still some outstanding issues that they were made aware of prior to booking the room. However it has still not been properly commissioned yet and we are expecting the first guest next Tuesday the 18th December and we have a carpenter building a built in wardrobe the day prior!

This plan shows the 1st floor portion of the main house and the bedroom that was to be worked upon is marked with an X. So the big plan was fairly straightforward we would remove the small study and push the landing door to the bedroom level with the stairs adding a small portion of wall there too. 

We would then remove the built in wardrobe in the corner of the room and by adding a wall and door make this a small en-suite shower room. Are you keeping up with me?  The small sink in the corner of the room would be removed making room for a new built in wardrobe.  Meanwhile we needed to raise the landing at the top of the stairs (more of this later) and then create a brand new room on the landing in the centre top of the plan by moving the wall left of that landing back into the bedroom top left of the main body of the house. This was to give us a decent bathroom of our own as the existing facilities were very poor.

The drainage for the en-suite would have to drop into the downstairs cloakroom necessitating the floor of the cloakroom to be dug up to allow the pipes to join the waste pipes that exited the building. Whilst the waste for the new bathroom would have to have the patio dug up to accommodate them.

So the end result was to look like this....  And yes that is a lot of toilets, something that did not go uncommented upon by the B&Q staff as we went through the tills with three toilets and sinks. "Got a problem 'ave you?" they quipped, "No", I thought ", But if I have I'll be well ahead of the game". However I declined to comment on the grounds that nothing I said would appease their curiosity. 

This plan was contrived by Alison and myself and then the project was managed by me which was fine during October when we had no guests but it became a lot harder as the guests started to arrive in November and December. The next few pictures show the rooms prior to the work commencing. 

Starting with the bedroom marked with the X you can see a wall behind the bed-head and a glimpse of a door on the landing. That is the Study and they are the walls that were to be taken down. The bedroom was then to be extended up to the wall at the back where the framed picture of a lighthouse can be seen hanging. Then that piece of landing was to be claimed as part of the new bedroom and a new door fitted at the far end. 

This next photo shows the view at the other end of the room where you can see the large built in wardrobe. The plan here was to tear out the cupboard doors and partitioning, build a small wall from the right side of the mirror into the room which would then turn to the right, have a door put into it and enable an en-suite shower, toilet and sink to be positioned within it.

The bed was to be placed where the radiator sits and it is that which represents a lot of the work that had to be accomplished to achieve our desired result. The plan required seven radiators to be removed, installed or re-positioned. Also many lights, power sockets and extractor fans to be re-configured. The plumber and electricians were indeed going to be crucial to the success of this renovation and most of the delays centred around the plumbers workload. Although because of other commitments our builder was unable to knock down the walls of the study which was mainly left for me to do.

The room had not been touched by us in the 2 years that we had lived here and was in a poor state of decoration as these window catches demonstrate. A few days back I tried to remove this window furniture and one of the top vent window's hinges snapped off. I've still to fix that.

 This photo shows the other side of that bedroom wall that had to be demolished. It is inside the Study which was where the past owner Vicar used to write his sermons and the shelves housed his books.

Here his folders sit in shelves above the door full of past sermons and some are records of the retreats that he held here for other Vicars and also 'healing' retreats too. These were recorded as being held here as recent as the mid nineties. But all of this had to be dismantled which was a shame as the joinery was true craftsmanship.

Here are a couple of examples of the beautiful joinery from his old desk. I have no need for these drawers now but I cannot bring myself to destroy such dedication to the art, so they just sit in my garage at the moment in limbo.   Well that is enough for today, tomorrow I will talk of the plans for the landing and the management and control of my poo pipes. I bet you just can't wait!!

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Back on the blog again......

So there I sat, the lights had dimmed and the familiar opening bars of the Overture to the musical Les Misérables crashed out accompanied by a stunning opening film sequence. I was sat in The Odeon cinema in Leicester square watching the private showing for the cast and crew of the film of Les Misérables as the personal guest of one of the movie's Producers a day before it premièred in the cinema across the other side of The Square and a month before it's release date. THIS, I thought, is about as far away from my life in Norfolk as I have been since we moved there two years ago and here I am hobnobbing with the likes of Cameron Mackintosh, Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway and other such likes.

You may ask.... How did this welcome break from the never ending cycle of refurbishment work at The Old Bakery come about?

You may well ask....


At the beginning of October we shut down the B&B and started a refurbishment that was to be completed by the second week of November. Ha!  In Grand Design tradition the clock ticked and the calendar flicked page after page and day by day the next set of guests loomed including the guests that had booked the new room that at one point was missing the door, door frame and half a wall for that matter.

I will post more details of this journey over the weeks leading up to Christmas but throughout this process we have also been spending some time trying to give the allotment some basic structure. I wanted to build some compost bins and went on the scrounge for wooden pallets. I asked around the village to no avail but then I had the brainwave to ask the local Jewson builders merchants if they ever had any spare ones that I could have for free and filled my car with 6 of them, then went back for more. I then recruited my octogenarian parents to do some hard labour and set my mum to dig for Britain and my dad to build the compost bins whilst I unleashed the sledgehammer...

 My mum told me of her days just after the war when she would go on farm holidays. Well at first this all sounded tickty boo until she explained that she had to dig up potatoes all day. Blow that for a game of back-aching soldiers and then she explained that she didn't get any pay for digging up the potatoes. Then... that she had to pay for her accommodation! So when I summarised my understanding of this holiday "So you paid to get there, you paid for the accommodation and you weren't paid to dig up potatoes (by hand) all day, you called this a holiday?"
She explained, "Well it wasn't as bad as it sounds, he gave us the food for free."
"How kind", I replied "Was it boiled, mashed or chipped!"

In hind sight, reviewing this photo, perhaps I should have suggested my father swapped his lightweight cotton baseball cap for a hard-hat!
Why is a sledgehammer called that?
 In what way was it ever used in the manufacture or in the process of sledging?

Anyway I managed to drive in the supporting posts without causing any long lasting damage to myself, my father and sadly to some degree the very posts that I was trying to ram into the ground.

And here you see the master craftsmen admiring their handy work. We were not only posing for the shot but I think we were trying to hold the thing in place at the same time.

This was way back in September when the warm Autumn sun beckoned me down to the allotment. Winter was coming and as there is no water supply down there I had been keen to acquire some large water butts. Each week I watched out for them in the local auction but they were often too expensive when they did come up for auction.
However my patience paid off and I managed to get these two for £45.

I have since connected them up to the drain pipe from my shed. A few weeks after doing so and after much rain I went to check on them. I was disappointed as I approached them as they appeared empty but when I got close up and checked the pipes I suddenly realised that the first one was completely full and indeed over flowing. 1,000 litres salvaged from the sky.
Since then the second is well on the way to being filled.

Other than this all I have achieved is to clear a few areas of dead weed from the plot and I really need to get back o the allotment soon, but No, no I had to go off swanning down to the Old 'Smoke' to see a film, albeit a very, very good film.

Over the last two years I have used a local electrician to do the work on our house. The guy that he sends to me has become my 'regular' and is an absolutely brilliant bloke at what he does. I happened to see that he had been working on a local house right over the summer and when I asked him he explained that it was a film producers house and what a lovely down to earth couple they were.
Anyway about 2 weeks ago she invited him and his partner down to see the cast & crew viewing of Les Misérables as she was a Producer of the film. I was so jealous as this is my favourite musical... ever. He was really concerned about going as he had no idea about the story. I leant him my CD (3 hours long) and explained the story in a Readers Digest précis form.
He was talking to the Producer about me and our conversation and she asked if he thought I would like to go too "As he certainly knows his stuff about Les Mis."  Well he knew the answer and she kindly invited myself and a guest. Sadly Alison couldn't go because we had guests and so I took my big brother, Jim. This was a lovely thing for this lady to have done especially when you see her list of other films that she has produced......

The film was absolutely fantastic, I urge you all to go and see it and if Anne Hathaway and the director do not win Oscars for their shot of "I dreamed a dream" then there is no justice in this world.  Just superb!!!






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Even the elephant is now redundant!

As Mike has previously mentioned since I started my gardening leave in late June I've been helping him with the B&B and the holiday cottage. Just before I left I made a huge, A3 size mind-map of all the different ways I could earn an income in the future, with three columns; one headed full-time employment, another as part-time employment and self-employed and the other as self-employed.

The employed options were to look at jobs as an HR manager / consultant / business partner.or working in Learning and Development or Talent Management on either a full or part time basis.

The self-employed options included establishing a business offering my services as a trainer or HR adviser. Another option was to become a coach. And then I looked at developing my hobby of patchwork and quilting and running workshops or quilt retreats.

So 4 months later (where has that time gone?) what's happened?

After quarter of a century I've started studying again to gain a Diploma in Coach/Mentoring which will take about 9 months to complete. I hope to be offering my services as a coach not just to people in Norfolk but over the phone and via Skype to people anywhere in the world! I'm setting up a business offering coaching but also training and HR advice and support for small businesses. More of that soon when Gladstone Coaching and Development is ready to launch.

A couple of weeks ago I ran a workshop combining cooking and sewing called Home-made Christmas and I'm doing another this weekend. We made fabric baskets and then chutney, mincemeat and coco-nut ice and each person went away with a folder of recipes, a fabric basket and jars of home-made preserves. And we offered the usual Old Bakery food with a home-made lunch and lemon drizzle cake.

The one job that wasn't on my mind-map was a maker of jams and chutneys. Starting gardening leave coincided with the start of the soft fruit season and I've made over 150 jars of jams, marmalades, jellies and chutneys including Rhubarb and Vanilla, Blueberry, Strawberry and Gooseberry to name but a few. I happened to mention that I was busy making these to our local butchers (they are the chattiest shop-keepers I've ever met) and they started putting in orders. At our local auction (James Beck Auctions, Fakenham) we picked up two separate pieces of old kitchen furniture which I rubbed down, repainted and decorated and we now display our produce in the porch. Sales to guests have been good and will hopefully increase as Christmas approaches. We don't get much passing trade but this week the postman bought a jar when he brought us our letters!

So here's some pictures of our produce - sadly we've had to replace the green 'Midland Bank' elephant.
£1 coins hadn't been invented when he was made and his slot is not wide enough to take these coins. There's an irony that even the elephant money box is now redundant!

Decorating and labelling the jams - and enjoying the garden at the same time.

The reformation of the refectory...........

It is with great regret that I am posting less blogs than I used to. This frustrates me because as I have said before this is my diary, or my account if you will of the events that constitute our first years in setting up our first and possibly not our last business. I publish via a blog so others can tune in if they wish and when I have more time I like to look back at the oddities of the historic events which Alison & I have encountered that finally culminated in the opening of this small business.

The infrequency of the blogs are actually for fairly good reasons in that we are simply just so busy and have been for the last 3- 4 months with our holiday cottage being booked up virtually solidly from June through to December and the B&B really busy right up until we took a 2 week holiday late September driving from Norfolk to Copenhagen..... We cannot stand holidays which for the most part involves sitting on a beach drinking a cocktail and only getting up to feed. No we like a little adventure, nothing major or too far away just getting out there and seeing a small part of an ever fascinating world.

Before we left we had several tasks that needed action one of them being to organise and make more habitable a room off our kitchen which we tend to use as a dinning  room come lounge. It was clearly an old barn or stable at one time but along the line it has had a door knocked through from the main house and consequently thereafter used as extended living quarters.

When we first saw this room it was very dark and had a row of chairs lined up as a meeting house might, it was called the refectory and so was likely used as the dining area previously.

 This is the only photo I have of the original look to the room. The stonewall at the end of the room is fairly new (i.e .some time in the last 30 years) and it effectively cuts the length of the barn in the middle allowing more rooms to be made behind it and above it in the eaves.
   This results in the ceiling beams only being about 6' from the floor and as I am 6'1" tall they represent a constant challenge which Alison does not have to suffer.
   The walls are painted white but there clearly is no damp-proofing and so there is a small level of dampness in some places but nothing that is a cause for concern.
   The floor like so many in this house has been covered in concrete probably hiding some really interesting old cobbles or flagstones and on top of this some rather nasty old 1970's carpet tiles have been well and truly stuck down, totally impossible to remove without a blowtorch or something.

The challenge here was not a major one we simply want to be able to sit in the room, eat and be able to watch TV.
We chose not to repaint the walls as the white was the most obvious choice to lighten the room anyway and it was in quite good nick. The floor however made the room feel dowdy and gloomy and so we decided to buy an off cut to lay ourselves. The thing was though, this room is 18' long and about 8-9' wide so remnants were generally too small. Luck would have it that Alison's father was replacing a carpet in his main living room and also in his dining room so we asked if we could have it as it was still in a reasonable condition and certainly good enough for our 'den'.

The carpet was so big that we lay it out on the garden lawn and drew the shape of our den with a felt tip marker then with a knife I cut hard and deep. When I had finished and taken the carpet away you could clearly see the shape of the refectory outline in the lawn and lots of fluff everywhere. We had to use strips of parcel tape face down to pick up the bits of fluff by sticking them to a strip until it  was full then cut another and lay it on the lawn picking up more. I was very conscious that we had guests in the cottage whom could return at any time to witness us seemingly giving our lawn a Bikini waxing thus further advancing Norfolk's reputation for oddity amongst the London socialites.

As in many other rooms in the house the light fittings had been handmade from carved and chiselled wood, whilst this was all very clever they were now dirty, hard to clean, loose and cumbersome and so I removed them all swapping them for some more contemporary spot lights.

The final thing was to place the TV in the room and the most obvious thing was to wall mount it. I had chosen a wall that appeared to be all brick and as a perfect position to be viewed. Well 3 wall mounts later and more disagreements with the by now infamous flints hidden behind plaster I affixed a wall mount to a wall. I managed to get it reasonably level and 3 of the 4 screws securing it well embedded into the wall. the final hole for a screw was never going to get deeper than an inch into the wall and rather than see this empty hole on the bracket winking at me I elected to stick an inch long screw into it. Now this plays no part in the support of the bracket but it just made me feel better that I could see a screw head in it's correct place, my Yin and My Yang were in harmony and I could move on with my life.

So now the room is complete and we make regular use of it, another of those To Do tasks ticked off the list only a hundred more!

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THE PLOT THICKENS

Now things have got very busy around here over the last few months and so I have to apologise to you for the extended lapse in blogs. Over the last 3 months we have been fully booked in the cottage and pretty close to fully booked in our Bed and Breakfast room.

This, of course, is bloody marvellous and has totally exceeded our expectations. After being given notice of redundancy from HSBC Alison elected to take up an option to take one months gardening leave followed by a further option to leave 1 month early and so she became 'available' in July. This was very useful in managing the busy time in the B and B.  However it was not her intention to get sucked into the daily running of the business but she can expand more on this in a later episode...

Alison was particularly helpful in stepping into Claire's shoes in cooking evening meals for the guests and making jams and has created quite a reasonable additional income in doing so but I will also leave this for Alison to expand upon at a later date.
Within this toil we have had the added workload of one allotment to concern ourselves with. You may recall that we have taken the rare opportunity to acquire an allotment just so we don't get too bored. Now this allottment plot is not a full sized one, no it is just half a plot and only measures 15 metres by 39 metres, that's 585sqmtrs or about 6,000sqft every inch of which was full of 3' high weeds. I have worked in several supermarket stores that were smaller than this and all I had to do there was sweep, mop and buff the floor and that took long enough.

Both the sheds are within the plot.

6,000sqft of weeds and debris and several anxious neighbouring allotmenteers all watching to see if  I, no WE are up to the challenge. So in July and August I made several trips down to the plot to try pulling out as many of the largest weeds as possible in the hope that I could stop them dropping their seeds but this was futile as for every plant that I plucked out my arse or elbow or mere presence caused a further 20 to shed 10 million other seeds. Also weeding a reasonable garden plot is one thing but this is more like a field!

The allotment has world heritage status as it contains 95% of the known worlds grass species and 12 as yet undiscovered ones.

It is rumoured that 'Big Foot' has been spotted here too.

A decision had to be made. Either we were going to try to manage the plot using as green and eco-friendly methods as possible over many back breaking weeks or.....
Several gallons of farm strength weed killer on the lot and start the whole thing from scratch.


So off we went to buy some weed killer.


I don't feel too guilty about this as it is exactly what Farmers do after every harvested crop, no it is a needs must sort of choice. So my neighbour across the road told me about a guy who lives at the end of the village and can supply me with the said weed killer and anything else that I may need to set up the allotment. Well Alison and I nipped down there to see what he could do for us. We had no idea that he sells stuff from his out buildings as he has no signs up or displays or any indication at all that he is in business. All he has is a wind sock in the field behind his house where his private runway sits for his aeroplane. We just assumed that he was a rich city gent or perhaps a pop star, we know that Martin Shaw lives in Norfolk and owns a Tiger Moth so we thought he would be of that ilk.
Far from it. The guy is well into his sixties and retired and being a fairly hefty old Norfolk farmer type he uses a mobility scooter to get around his yard but yet he owns a plane and regularly flies off to Essex in it. As we drove onto his property a sensor picks us up and the next thing you see is this cheerful Bernard Matthews kind of geyser whizzing around the corner on his mobility scooter. He explained he and his wife don't need to use them but it just means they can get around the property a lot quicker!

After some 10 minutes of conversation pretty NFN (Normal for Norfolk) he says "follow me" and we had to jump into the car and pursue his mobility scooter which was rapidly disappearing around another corner...

Eventually stopping by what appeared to be a couple of aircraft hangers where he took us into one of them and opened one of several boxes of weed killers followed be a full run down on its capabilities and useage. We then received a précis of his life story  'The later years....'  this is fairly typical up here and if you go into any pub and buy a fellow a pint you will find no problem in obtaining his, his wife's, his parents and indeed even his wife's parents life story. I believe that it is the very reason that they created kicking out time in the pubs just to give the poor sod at the receiving end a chance to say "Oh, is that the time?" "I guess I'll just have to hear how your great Aunt Meredith got on when she moved all those miles away to.....?  Oh, the next village you say, well I'll look forward to hearing that story another day... such a shame they called time."

We bought the weed killer, a pump and a pair of gloves and we were there for nearly an hour. Afterwards I explained to the neighbour that had sent me there that I could of driven the 10 miles to Fakenham bought some from B&Q and driven back the 10 miles in that time. He said "Why would you want to waste all that time when you've got a guy right here in the village?".


 They live in a far simpler and happier time zone here in Norfolk and I still haven't quite got it yet.....   but I will, I will.

WMD........ Weapons of Mouse Destruction.

We have a few mice and shrews taken up residence in the garden. They are by no means a serious problem and we probably would be none the wiser if it were not for the fact that Scribble (our cat) has taken it upon her self to carry out a Bush like Shock and Awe attack on the critters.

This cat is at least 12 years old and should really be thinking seriously about her retirement and not running around like a teenager. Don't get me wrong a mouser is invaluable in keeping the rodent population at bay and indeed I even tried to get the Accountant to class the cat as tax deductible for playing this role. But I wasn't expecting that she would actually catch any!!

The trouble is, you see, she can't just catch and eat the mice, no she has to play with them for half an hour first. We have sat in our living room and watched the B&B's cat from across the road trot merrily along with a dead king size rat in its jaws swinging to and fro as the cat jauntily jogs along. That's the thing you see... it's dead as a dodo, dispatched to it's rat run in rodent heaven, whereas our cat will having caught the thing take it back to her lair and play with it for an inordinate amount of time.

She will invariably save the moment for the very time that we have chosen to eat our breakfast out on the patio resulting in me having to interrupt said breakfast to go and rescue the poor bullied rodents.

Scribble has clearly sensed that I am writing about her and has climbed across the furniture and plumpted herself down on my lap twisting her head right back to stare at me with her two large black iris's and looking as cute as a cuddly teddy bear. "What me?" she could be saying.

So I am in the middle of my toast and marmalade when there is much commotion and hoo-haa coming from under the rusty red cob nut tree better known as my evil cats lair. A shrew is being mauled as I break for a sip of my PGTips, I look away feeling guilty and spread a little butter on the toast...  Looking up I watch the cat suddenly jump up like a spring lamb as she is surprised that when she lifted her paw to see if she still had the thing it took the opportunity to make a dash for it. With her wits quickly recovered she zooms off after it in hot pursuit and once again wraps her clawed paw around the poor sod. I spread a little marmalade on to the toast only to have my eye drawn back to the cat throwing the shrew up into the air stabbing it with her spiteful claws on the way down.

As I raise the toast to my mouth and as the taste buds prepare for that warm marmaladey taste my conscience over-rules the whole procedure and I feel obliged to save the shrew from the humiliation and suffering and throw my toast down grummbling "Bloody Cat!".

We have found that a very large clear plastic salad bowl with a flattened  Cornflake box works brilliantly well in catching the distraught rodent, you simply use it as you would a glass and a piece of card when catching a spider.

I then find myself leaving the house (and my toast) and with one hand under the cardboard and the 2nd one ontop of the upturned salad bowl whilst the rodent runs around (or limps) in circles I march down the lane past some houses hoping not to meet anyone on route and finally release the creature into the hedgerow. I am even more concerned at meeting someone on the way back as the reason for me carrying a large (tinted lime green) salad bowl and a flattened Kelloggs cornflake box is far less discernible to any onlooker.

Back in the garden I see the cat looking totally bewildered as she re-visits and sniffs the place where I captured the shrew. "That is so odd", I can imagine her thinking, "I had it in my paws, I swear I did! Where on earth did the blithering thing disappear to?".

And whilst I leave the cat to ponder this enigma, I return to a piece of cold toast washed down with some cold tea. Lovely.

WMD

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