Not such a Tufty

I’m not known for being particularly squeamish. I’m not too shocked by blood, but plasters make me weak at the knees. I’m not too scared of getting my hands dirty coding websites, but WordPress giving me blank screens and refusing to save anything for the last week or so did make me a little worried.

I’m not even scared of spiders. Well that’s sort of true. It’s true I’m not scared of our eight-legged friends, but the screaming and running away of friends and the lovely Sarah make me feel like I should be scared of them.

Therefore, when woken at 5:30am the other morning I wasn’t an immediate quivering scaredy cowering under the duvet and hiding behind Mr Tedsworth . I was woken by what sounded like a plant pot rolling around in the garden. Although annoyed at my own broken sleep, being British my mind quickly turned to ‘oh no, I’m disturbing the neighbours. Better go and shut it up’.

Bleary-eyed I stumbled to the window, waited for my eyes to gradually climatise to the brilliant sunshine I had been blissfully sleeping through, and found the plant pot was actually rolling around above my head. In the loft. In fact the plant pot was rolling in a perfectly straight line in the loft. And had clearly grown feet. Perhaps feet with tap-dancing shoes on them.

Now I was worried. Clearly a diminutive burglar, having been unable to lift the telly or dvd player downstairs, was running around stealing the empty boxes in my loft . And he was a trained tap-dancer. And very fast. With four legs. Or were there two of them? Dancing in formation?

The lovely Sarah had stirred by now, and her concern was aroused much quicker than my own. Just as it is with spiders, so too with four-legged burglars. Sarah’s fear turned my bemusement into paranoia and I found myself edging away from the scratching at the loft hatch. However, being The Man of the house I felt the need to do something decisive. So I tapped on the ceiling. Remembering how the pet gerbils of my childhood would drum rhythmically on the floor when they felt in danger I briefly considered tapping my feet on the floor, but then decided to tap on the ceiling instead. This, I thought, would make the squirrel think, ‘aha! he’s telling me it’s dangerous down there. I’d better go back to my home. I think GMTV’s starting soon’. At least it seemed like a good idea at 5.34am.

In fact it was an engenius idea. The squirrel ran away from the drumming. Sensing danger, however, it panicked and fell out of the loft and into the wooden box filling the space below the guttering at the front of the house. By 5.55am we were standing out on the street looking up at our roof listening to something inside running back and forth along the full width of our house. Then the neighbours’ lights started going on one by one. Then the screaming started. Clearly tap-dancing squirrels have a large set of lungs on them – this thing could beat Lulu or Aretha in a singing contest.

There was only one thing left to do – Run inside before anyone could tell it was our house. So decisive action was taken. Shut the door to the room with the loft hatch, and try to sleep through it. It worked. 40 minutes sleep was snatched from the jaws of squirrel robbery, and quick showers were taken to the constant drumming practice of a squirrel stuck on the other side of the wall.

Do squirrels have a Houdini gene, and can therefore escape confinement from boxes? Can they burrow through wood? Can they fall from the top of a house unscathed? How long after death do they start to smell?

Answers please.