Half asleep in the early hours, I trundled back to bed from the loo, muttering that I had lost a dream. Alistair got up too and announced that he had just stepped on one...
Smiling to myself, I remembered my early introduction both to the poetry of Yeats and to the Oxford Book of Quotations...
"But I, being poor, have only my dreams - I have spread my dreams under your feet; tread softly, for you tread on my dreams"
A lifelong love of poetry and books of quotations has ensued...
Today I walked the dog...my grumpy mood and achey limbs has dissipated and we enjoyed meeting, at a distance, Cody and his missus, a jogging couple, with whom I discussed uses for the wild garlic I had picked, and the young man with the dog who is all jowls...
I picked a bit of Jack-in-the-Hedge as I came home, for comparison with the wild garlic (this will even grow in my garden!), but to be honest it doesn't measure up - way too... mustardy I think.
And we have a mouse! Last evening I saw a tail disappear down the back of the under-sink cupboard, and this morning it had left its calling card all over ...
So, it's out with the mouse-trap again and emptying the food cupboards into lidded boxes until we've caught it.
We've often had mice as part of our family story...when the children were young we often caught them in our village kitchen, and Alistair, who commuted cross-country, would have strict instructions to release them 'somewhere near a barn...'
One of our hamsters, a real Houdini, used to escape to live with the mice behind the dresser, like a character in a Beatrix Potter tale...
My Dad, an old softy, used, when young, to set humane traps in his office, with a matchstick in the shutter, in case of trapping the mouse's tail. In Dad's last months he had a mouse in the house, and nightly left crumbs out for it - when Dad died, my brother and his children caught the mouse and released it, at my suggestion, in the cemetery...
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