I’m really not good with wildlife, or even tamelife; even such mundane animals as cats and dogs scare me. But I am getting better at coping with the invasion of seriously big spiders every autumn and I can tolerate the bats in the attic, simply by making sure I don’t go in there at night.   However, when a toad crept in through the door one evening and started hopping towards the wardrobe, Nick did have to come to the rescue; it ended up in one of my shoes. Imagine if I’d put my shoe on in the morning and found it full of toad – it really doesn’t bear thinking about!

Now there’s no Hugo to deal with the autumn influx of mice,I’m practicing setting mouse traps, but Nick has to deal with the remains. There was a lot of noise last night, in the kitchen; a strange noise, it didn’t sound exactly like the fridge making ice, so Nick went to investigate. There was a mouse under the sink; it was caught in the trap, but still alive, poor thing (I can say that when it’s no longer there), so he had to dispatch it pronto, by hitting it on the head with the washing up bowl.

But yesterday, when I went into the bedroom to put away some clothes and found a snake in the middle of the floor, it was just more than I could cope with. Nick, thinking “something serious had happened”,(it had!), came hurtling downstairs to find me frozen to the spot and almost incapable of rational speech, only to declare it “just a small one” and “very pretty”, before packing it into a plastic box and taking it to the far end of the vines.

I think I’ll always be a townie at heart.