Wah-ooo! Squirrels Of Surrey.

We've been having trouble with squirrels recently. Actually it's Soozie who's having the problem, as she's the real gardener in the relationship. I only like the kind of gardening that consists entirely of reclining on a sun-lounger with a beer, while Soozie embraces what I have come to call Full Contact Gardening, which involves a lot of heaving heavy sacks about, digging and nurturing things. She loves the little plants she raises and gets upset if they fail to flourish.

Anyway, due to some mysterious shift in the balance of nature in the Redhill area, this year we have lots more squirrels than usual and they have become emboldened to the point of insolence. At some point I fear they may begin to feast on human flesh, but so far the little bastards have merely developed a taste for running along our fence and flinging themselves onto the hanging baskets, where they wreak havoc.

(Interesting word, "wreak". It only gets used together with the word "havoc", and "havoc" only gets used with "wreak". You don't say "where they do havoc." The only other time we use "wreak" is in its past tense, as in "wrought-iron". But I digress.)

Back to the squirrels. I don't know why they like the baskets, but the end result is that they dig up all Soozie's baby petunias, exposing their little infant roots and killing them. In principle Soozie's kind to animals, but in practice if those squirrels were a fraction slower there'd be a pile of furry carcasses from one end of the garden to the other. We can't get them. Nobody I know owns a gun, and actually Im not sure I could do it - a clean kill would be all right, I suppose, but the thought of winging one and having to listen to its whimpering death-throes doesn't do a lot for me. In any case I have a strong Belfast accent and people who sound like me have ended up in a police cell with a black bag over their heads for a lot less than waving a shotgun about.

One morning a couple of weeks ago I was at work and Soozie phoned. "They've done it again." she squealed piteously. "And I had an idea and I thought that if I put chilli powder round the baskets it would make the squirrels sneeze and put them off so I sprinkled the powder but I was so upset about my dead petunias that I was crying and I rubbed my eyes and I had chilli powder on my hands and it went in my eyes and it really hurt and my eyes were watering on top of the tears and I had to drive to work and I couldn't see properly and I could have been killed." She paused to take a breath. "I COULD HAVE DIED BECAUSE OF A FUCKING SQUIRREL!"

So at the weekend we buy a "humane" squirrel trap. It's a wire mesh box with a spring-loaded door connected to a little plate inside where you put the bait, the idea being that the squirrel's weight trips the spring and the door shuts. Then you take the trapped squirrel for a long car ride and release it indignant but unharmed. This assumes that the average squirrel has a poor homing instinct and therefore will be unable to hitchhike back to your garden in a couple of days. Anyway, who'd stop their car for a squirrel? Nobody, that's who, not even if it was heavily pregnant.

to be continued...