Sandy’s Garden ... There’s a Moose Loose Aboot This Hoose

Is there anybody out there who still remembers Lord Rockingham’s XI?
Sandy SimpsonSandy Simpson
Sandy Simpson

For the benefit of, I am certain, the vast majority of … if not all … readers, Lord Rockingham’s XI were a mixed-race, mixed-gender jazz outfit assembled as the house band on pioneering pop show ‘Oh Boy!’ Comprising Benny Green, Bernie Taylor, Cherry Wainer, Cyril Reuben, Don Storer, Dougie Wright, Eric Ford, Harry Robinson, Ian Fraser, Kenny Packwood, Red Price, Reg Weller, Rex Morris and Ronnie Black, these session musicians had a hit with the song, ‘Hoots Mon’, which was a number-one hit single for three weeks in 1958 on the UK Singles Chart. (Three weeks at number one, wey-hey!) And one line of the immortal lyrics of ‘Hoots Mon’ … one of four what are described as ‘stereotypical Scottish phrases’ … is: ‘There’s a moose loose aboot this hoose.’ No, they don’t write lyrics like these any more. This memorable line was penned by band member Harry Robinson, who was actually Harry Robertson, the son of Henry Robertson of Elgin; in later life the composer entered the English aristocracy when he married professional photographer Ziki Arbuthnot, who inherited the Wharton Barony in Yorkshire in 1990, becoming the eleventh Baroness Wharton. To borrow a phrase from a different television show: ‘Didn’t he do well?’

And after that lengthy overture, we return to the moose which is loose aboot this hoose, for there is one … more accurately, there must be a number, although I have only seen one … which has decided to share our home this coming winter. The circumstances in which we met are simply explained. I was looking out through the glass door of what we might call our ‘breakfast room’, or I might call ‘my office’ and which Ailsa might call the ‘utility room’, when a movement on the doorstep caught my eye. Initially I thought it might be a wren seeking some hither-to overlooked crumb: but when I rose to see just what it was, there was a mouse, which scurried into an imagined hiding place between the edge of the doorstep, our back wall and the grey food waste caddy. Of course, this hidey-hole was open to the sky, allowing me to step outside and gaze down on our small rodent which, becoming aware of my presence, looked up. I can truthfully say that I have absolutely no recollection of ever having exchanged a long look into the eyes of a mouse before. Then, unsettled by the threat which I presumably posed, the mouse scurried back along the doorstep and vanished into a small gap which gave it access to … I think … the space between the outer and inner brickwork of the house wall. And I wonder to what other part(s) of our home it has access.

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A number of years ago, field mice found a way to get beneath our kitchen floorboards. We discovered their presence when a damp patch of floor revealed a leaking dishwasher; and the service engineer who came to attend to the leak found that a flexible plastic waste pipe had been a nice cosy spot for mice to relax on, nibbling on the plastic when they felt peckish. Having no wish whatsoever to entertain such expensive uninvited lodgers again, we are wondering how to evict them. As far as we can discover, there seems to be known way to make their den unwelcoming in the same way as lion poo is said to persuade cats to desist from using parts of our garden as a toilet or cayenne pepper dissuades grey squirrels from digging up our tulip bulbs. When I was a child, I used to accompany my maternal uncles on their rounds of hillsides near their homes checking for rabbits choked in the snares they had set; and, while I was quite happy to eat stewed rabbit, I didn’t like to see the evidence of the lingering deaths they had experienced. So, I don’t want to use mousetraps. Nor do I particularly want to give them the slow deaths offered by some of the rodenticides which I can buy. But I want them out, out, out! What’s to be done?