Noises in the night.

Hello and welcome to the latest blog in the Olivia Rose Diaries on March 18th 2022. Life has been very quiet since we arrived back at Le Shack but we had a bit of excitement last night. It wasn’t exactly a major event, but I am still going to share it with you. Imagine yourself as a fly on our wall in the early hours of the morning, when the cabin is clothed in darkness and the silence is absolute.

It’s 2am and something isn’t right. Something has woken me up. I lie in bed for a moment, jolted from sleep into full awareness, and listen. Nothing but silence.

Another minute passes and I persuade myself that I am dreaming. I roll over and close my eyes. And there it is again. This time I sit up in bed.

No doubt about it now. A noise but I can’t quite decide what it is. It’s familiar but out of place. I nudge Michael.

‘Are you awake?’ I whisper.

‘No.’

‘Can you hear it?’

‘Hear what?’

‘It sounds like…..,’ I pause, struggling to explain what I was hearing but then it comes to me. ‘It sounds like someone is eating crisps.’

‘You must have dreamed it.’ He turns over and is asleep in seconds.

I take my torch from the bedside table, and creep over to the kitchen cupboards. There’s no doubt about it, we have a critter eating our food. Predictably the noise stops seconds before I open the door. The cupboard is full of tins and a couple of boxes of pasta, all untouched. Getting down on my hands and knees I shine the torch onto the lowest shelf where I keep a big bag of dried cat food and find the cause. A trail of kibble runs the whole length of the cupboard. The crackling noise that had woken me had been a mouse rummaging around in the bag and taking out one or two biscuits at a time. Where he was taking them to was a mystery as we had dealt with all our possible mouse entry spots last year and hadn’t had any visitations since then.

It reminded me of a time when we lived in Wales and had a similar experience with a bag of dog food. I went to pick up a new bag from our store cupboard one morning and found it half empty. There was a mouse-sized hole in the bottom and as I looked around I saw that one of my long black riding boots, no longer used, was full of the missing dog food. A mouse had been diligently and quietly creating a new stash for himself and I couldn’t help but be impressed at the time and effort he’d taken to move it all, if slightly nonplussed as to why he bothered in the first place.

Other than this exciting rodent interlude I have little else to share with you. I always get restless when life gets quiet, but perhaps I should be grateful for that given what is happening in the outside world. However, in a fortnight we shall be heading back to the boat and I can feel the sense of anticipation slowly building.

Another cause for celebration is that our landscape is turning green again. Each day we see another tree coming into bud and then green shoots emerging. The bluebells are thickening and I can just see the flowers coming through at the base. Sadly we may not be here to see them this year, but I shall spend this afternoon thinking about what I want to grow in my pots on Olivia – all nineteen of them – and that is compensation enough.

See you soon. Take care.

MJ