Wildlife

I saw a rat in the yard today. This is not a good sign.

Roger Poopy has been hunting it earnestly ever since. I jolly well hope he catches it.

Of course the Lake District is not short of rats, it would not be possible to be otherwise, especially given the number of restaurants and their cellars and dustbins within fifty yards of our house. All the same, I am not keen and hope it leaves quickly.

Almost worse than that, we have got an enormous garden spider squatting in our bedroom window. It is on the outside otherwise it would have been removed, but it is there, and large, and forbidding, and has left dollops of spider-poo all over the glass. I have been plotting its eviction for some time: but a tiny gentleman spider appeared last week, and then disappeared quite soon afterwards, poor chap, and I think she has now built herself a nest of babies.

I do not like being unkind to spiders, although I fear it is becoming inevitable, because I jolly well do not want accidentally to leave the window open on the day when they are hatching and finish up with a bedroom full of baby garden spiders, not least because they bite. We have just removed a monster from the conservatory that had become so large that it was beginning to size up the dogs. It had a huge, dense web in the corner, so stickily lethal that it would not even give way easily to the vacuum cleaner, and which stretched out into the room for more than a foot.

You will not be surprised to hear that Mark moved it. There are some areas into which gender equality has not crept.

I think they are attempting a takeover. I opened the door today to find that yet another garden spider had built a massive web across it, presumably in an attempt to capture the postman. I removed that one, which must have looked ridiculous from the other side of the road, as I stood on the doorstep waving a large stick in the manner of Harry Potter, trying to clear the numerous and immensely sticky strands of web.

The spider beetled off down the garden path. It can go and live next door, which is a holiday house, it will be ages before they notice.

In other news, I have made fudge and chocolates. I have baked a pie and written my poem. It will be a few days before I can put it on here, because I am not supposed to put it online before it has been handed in, but I think it is finished, apart from some gloomy tweaking. I have now started writing the critical analysis, explaining what I have done and why. This has got to be three thousand words, and: I have written a poem because I want to get a good mark, simply will not do.

I have been reading up about the correct names for its meter, because obviously I have forgotten all of that sort of thing since school, and the things I have read today make me suspect that I probably wasn’t listening in the first place. If anybody knows about these things, the lines go to this tune: I’d Got to write a Poem, and I Thought I couldn’t Do it, what on earth is that? It isn’t Iambic anything, I don’t think, and I can’t work out any of the other alternatives.

Answers on a postcard please, or at any rate in the Comments. I would be very glad of some better-informed input.

It is depressing to discover that I am not nearly as clever as I like to think I am.

I am not feeling very optimistic about it. I do not think it is likely to achieve a First at this stage, frankly it will be lucky to achieve Could Do Better.  Probably I will not shoot myself about this in this instance, because I have never considered myself a potential poet, so you need not worry too much.

Mark is rebuilding the fire whilst I am writing to you. He has finished glueing it all back together, and has patched up all of the once-rusty bits and it is looking just like a new one, or at any rate, like a sort of patchwork-design of a new one. This means that it will not be long before we can light it again, as soon as the new pipes are plumbed into it.

I am looking forward to that bit.

It might even be in the next month.