Strangers

The Mill at St Pierre

In the last couple of days at the mill, the local farmer cut the small but ripe wheat crop only yards from the mill  - not that we noticed him until we went out for a walk to St Pierre and discovered he'd been and gone. He probably displaced a lot of creatures, which we think is the reason why dh suddenly said as we sat on the sofa watching the tv on Tuesday night, 'There's a mouse.'

There was; in fact there were two. They seemed totally unphased by our presence across the hearth rug. Dh put down some blue pellets (poison) and then we sat and watched the little things munch their way through them. Harvest mice are a lovely golden brown, and really cute. They can move like greased lightning, almost too fast to see. Left to myself, I would not have put the stuff down, but dh wouldn't hear of it. 'By the time Jenny and David come down, there'll be a colony of mice, not just two,' he said.

So next morning I made dh go into the living room first to see if there were any dead bodies, but he returned to the bedroom saying all was clear. We closed all the shutters, left all the internal doors open so the air can flow around the house and put all food stuffs out of reach of mice, because they get into the most peculiar places.

Our journey home was uneventful and stress free.
The miles flew by and we arrived in Caen far too early for the overnight ferry back to Portsmouth, so we strolled around enjoying the sunshine. Actually, the ferry port is not Caen, but eight miles away on the coast at Ouistreham - a place that seems to draw tourists to the Normandie beaches Sword and Juno, where the wartime evacuation took place during October 1944.