The taming of the shrew...

In which this has nothing to do with Shakespeare. But the story goes like this....

"Mouse!" shrieks H7 as we are all dozing in a row on the sofa, adults wondering when to struggle out of torpor and send the children to bed, children wondering how long they can spin out the snuggling on the sofa. Monsters Inc. is playing on the Blu-ray.

H7: "I saw a mouse! I definitely saw a mouse. That's the third time I've seen it, but I wasn't sure. Now I am. It was definitely a mouse."

"Where?" says Brian, rousing himself slightly. I open an eye. I wasn't really asleep on the sofa at 7.30 pm. Really.

"There, in that little hole," says H7 pointing to the bottom of the stairs*.

(*Weird Welsh cottage layout number 1: Here I'll introduce you to our stairs. This is a little Welsh cottage. The stairs run from the living room and they have a door at the bottom. There's about six steps up, a turn on a landing, then another six. The door closes on the bottom step and then there is a weird stone buttress which juts out into the room. This is a convenient table or extra seat, but it has a little hole at the bottom where it meets the stairs. Brian keeps filling this hole - once I was sitting on the stairs with H1.5 and something which later turned out to be a big hairy spider tickled me on the back.)

This hole has history. Now it contains a mouse. We have no reason to doubt H7. After all she'd checked her facts three times before informing us.

"I'll put a trap out for it," says Brian.

"One of those ones where you put some cheese on and it comes down snap onto the mouse?" says H7.

"Yes," says Brian.

My children aren't in the least bit squeamish.

Later they go to bed and Brian sets up two traps. One of the snap sorts and the other a big trap which catches them alive.

"I'll give it a 50:50 chance," he says.

We settle down for the end of University Challenge.

"There it is!" exclaims Brian after a couple of seconds.

Sure enough there is it, a little shrew, not a mouse, frantically running up and down the bottom stair. It whizzes straight past the live trap, tries to climb the walls a few times, negotiates the bookshelf and squeezes under the door into the kitchen.

"We'll never find it in there," we say, giving up and going back to Paxman and forgetting all about the shrew.

Seconds later: "AAAARRRGGGHHHH!" (That was me.)

"What the f*** are you doing?" (That was Brian, slightly pained. I'd landed on him. Feet first, into his lap.)

"The shrew just ran into my toe!"

"It what?"

"IT RAN INTO MY TOE!"

"Good God woman!" says my dear husband, dripping with sympathy.

I look under the armchair and there it is, wiffling its little nose and looking at the door*.

(*Weird Welsh cottage layout number two: The front door is in the living room.)

To cut a long story short, we opened the door and, after a little more frantic to-ing and fro-ing, the shrew apparently left.

Later Brian goes out into the bathroom and comes back with the large lidded see-through yoghurt pot we keep specifically for ONE purpose.

"It could have been worse," he says happily, referring to the shrew plus toe incident, "it could have been this." Here he thrusts pot plus large hairy spider in my direction.

I HATE men.