War zone

My weekend was fairly quiet (except for some squeaking, more about that later) until Sunday morning. I was strolling around the garden picking raspberries when it occurred to me that there were some unusual sounds drifting in from the southeastern direction of our village. At first it sounded like someone was demolishing a building... but on a Sunday this seemed rather odd. It took me a few minutes to remember that this was the weekend the battle of Waterloo is reenacted every year, on the battlefield itself. What I was hearing were cannons being fired ! We live about 14 km from the battlefield and the sounds were being carried right to my orchard. I can only imagine what it must have been like for people in the area while it was going on for real... and all those poor farmers... and all those poor horses... which once again confirms what I know about myself: I don't have a bad bone in my body and war is a totally alien and horrific concept to me...

Except that I have had my own, rather comical battle on the weekend too, when during the night of Friday I suddenly heard our cat growling in an uncharacteristic way. I stumbled out of bed, went downstairs in a stupor, only to find the cat very much engaged in a hide-and-seek game with a squealing mouse in the kitchen. Now you must know this cat is 17 years old and getting on... she used to catch mice and bring them in as live toys when she was 10 or so, but I thought she was much too old by now to even pursue a mouse, let alone catch it and carry it inside through an electronic cat flap... quite a feat for an elderly feline I admit ! The thing was, I needed to get this mouse out of the house as quickly as possible, as I am blessed with a husband who is phobic of most forms of life (and I suspect this includes certain human life forms too, but that's another story). I could not trust the cat to actually kill the mouse -- I knew this from experience. So that had me running around the kitchen with a dustpan and brush like a giant Tom to this superb little Jerry-mouse. I have used this technique before and it worked yet again but one needs to be quick: the mouse is to be caught on the dustpan and held down very firmly with the brush, then carried outside and released... So I did the humane thing, succeeded in catching the mouse after 3 aborted tries, and flung it back into the undergrowth where I suppose it caught it's breath again. I must say it was an amazingly big and healthy looking mouse (in my old flat where the cat regularly brought me these presents, she only caught the tiny, skinny field mice), so I suppose the mouse must have survived the whole performance... I am actually proud of having dealt with this in such a swift and expert way... and I can only hope that I will not have to repeat this kind of trick too often...