There's a Mouse in the House, Frogspawn, Calon Teifi Transition Cafe, Rhod Gilbert

     I was sitting here in the office attending to the usual tedious email stuff  when I heard a very small scrabbling sound and on looking round I espied a small brown house mouse (not wearing a striped petticoat) making its way in a fairly leisurely manner across the doorway and then disppearing from view into a gap behind the skirting board where presumably somewhere in the depths of our thick stone walls it had a family waiting for its return. (I was brought up on a healthy, if anthropomorphic, diet of Beatrix Potter.)
 We are quite accustomed to sharing the house with various lodgers, bats & birds in the eaves and indeed the occasional mouse but rarely do they make their presence known quite so blatently. I fear we shall have to set a trap, not having any cats on the farm. Perhaps it is time we introduced a feline element to our lives.

It is another gorgeous morning...I have hung washing out for the first time this year.

We are still waiting for lambs to start arriving but meanwhile the boys are busy spreading slurry on the fields while the weather is so good and the tractors will not make a terrible mess of the ground..

This past week I have found frogspawn in the ponds and indeed in the fields where a careless frog has just laid the spawn in great jellied clumps on the grass. Whenever we do find it like that we pick it up and deposit it in the ponds so that the tadpoles will have some chance of survival.

Yesterday the Farmer & I attended the Calon Teifi transition cafe (http://www.calonteifi.org.uk/) in our local village hall. We have not been to the cafe for months and it was good to catch-up with various people and to meet some new members. The main discussion was concerning food and its preservation. Many people weree interested in bottling fruit and in making cider which the Farmer & I do anyway, but we would be more than happy to share our experinces with those who are interested.

The programme that was filmed here in January, 'The Rhod Gilbert Work Experience' is to be broadcast tomorrow evening (7th March) at 10.35pm on BBC One Wales if anyone is interested in watching. If you cannot get BBC Wales then it should be available on BBC Iplayer, I think.