Wah-ooo! Squirrels Of Surrey (2)

We have to give some thought to both positioning and timing. Lily The West Highland Terrier is a dog whose grip on reality is fragile at the best of times, as she demonstrates each time she tries to bite an aeroplane on its way into Gatwick, believing it to be Small, Slow and Near rather than Big, Fast and Far Away. If she's confronted with a helpless squirrel in a wire cage she'll have some sort of excitement-induced seizure, particularly if Soozie and I are both at work and unable to intervene. We decide that if we position the trap on the (flat) garage roof then Lily may not notice.

The other thing is that I don't like the thought of the squirrel being trapped in the cage from eight-thirty in the morning until six-thirty in the evening while we're away from the house, even if the little bastard almost killed my wife, so we agree that we won't set the trap until Monday morning, because I'm working at home then so I'll be able to give the captive rodent my immediate attention. (Note to self: check if squirrels are rodents. They're definitely not fish, insects, birds or lizards. And not marsupials either. After that it gets trickier.)

Seven a.m. on Monday morning I bait the trap with peanut butter and pistachio nuts and put it on the garage roof. I go up to my office and start working. After about half an hour Soozie comes in. "We've got one," she says. "and he's not happy."

I don't know what I expected, really. I suppose I thought that the animal would be sitting quietly looking sulky and waiting to be allowed a phone call to its lawyer or something, but what I see when I go down and look at the cage is this frantic ball of fury hurling itself against the wire mesh, and attacking it with its teeth. It's already covered with blood and getting more hysterical by the minute. I decide I have to let it go straight away, but I'm determined to get at least some value for the £15.99 I paid for the trap, so I put on a pair of gardening gloves in case the squirrel tries to maul me, and put the cage in the car.

I drive to Redhill Common and park. Parents and young children are walking past the car on their way to St. John's school, and I have to stand in front of the car boot so that they don't see that I have a blood-soaked animal in a trap. The sight of a burly bald bearded man with a guilty expression loitering near a school causes the parents to look at me with deep suspicion. When they've gone I hurriedly grab the trap and walk into to the edge of the woods, open the door and watch the squirrel streak off into the trees without a backward glance.

I get back to the house. Soozie's just about to leave for work. She looks at the empty trap which still has blood and pieces of squirrel-lip all over the wire. She looks at me. We can't use the trap again, can we?" she says. "No, Soozie," I reply, "we can't."