I think that little blogging challenge thing that I did last week might have worked.  Here we are only a couple of days on and I’ve already got the urge to put pen to paper again.  Or keyboard to electrons or something.

Let me tell you about Monday…

Monday was a funny sort of day.  I didn’t feel too well for most of the first half of it to be honest and, although I would like to say that it was all self-inflicted following a weekend of frenetic partying and wild living, nothing could be further from the truth.  I’ve reached that stage where the only “wild living” that I do tends to be the occasional moments of rock ‘n’ roll excess when playing a gig.  And, even then, the phrase “rock ‘n’ roll excess” is just a massively overstated way of saying “perhaps a pint of Thrutchmettles Old Furtler or Snozzlingtons Fiery Weasel or something during the first half”.

Anyhoo…  Having started the day feeling under the weather and, as a result, staying resolutely under the duvet for as long as unreasonably possible, it finally reached the point where I had to raise myself from my intermittent slumbers and face the world.  This was partly because I had to pop down the office to do a bit of power and network recabling (following our slight relocation and rearrangement of various things on Friday) but mainly because I had to be at a TSJ rehearsal on Monday night.

So, cables duly cabled, power duly powed and network duly nettled, I returned home, loaded my assorted musical accoutrements into the car and headed for the rehearsal rooms in Stockton where we practise strutting our stuff.  Overall, it was a pretty good session, even allowing for the fact that our drummer couldn’t make it that night, so we were playing without the usual assortment of beautifully executed booms, thuds, crashes and tinkles that he normally provides.  A fair bit of fun was had by all along the way and 10 p.m. or thereabouts saw me climbing back into the car and heading for home.  So far so good.

When I got back, I found Glenda still up and about watching a film, so I made myself a sandwich, grabbed a cup of tea and settled down to do a bit of web-surfing and assorted email checking before bed.  This seemed like a good and sensible plan and I was already thinking fond thoughts of climbing back under the duvet once again and trying to recapture some of the more bizarre and peculiar dreams from my nice long lie-in earlier in the day.

Then Trillian arrived.  Which is not such a big deal under normal circumstances, aside from introducing some extra furry, squee-ing cuteness into the room.  However, on this occasion, she did not arrive on her own.  She arrived, with a bit of a run, a dash, a bang and a bash, accompanied by a new friend in the shape of a live mouse that she had caught out in the garden somewhere and decided to introduce to the rest of the family.  This, in itself, would not have been so bad had she kept a closer eye on her new little buddy.  But that wasn’t to be and, before we knew it, the mouse was on the run, closely followed by Trillian, who was closely followed by Glenda.  Meanwhile, I stood there in the middle of the room saying “Huh?  Eh?  What?  Oh bugger!”

The next couple of hours were an interesting frenzied time of furniture moving and dashing back and forth, all the while trying to keep an eye on the small, brown blur that was belting hither and yon across the room, hiding under dressers and bookcases, climbing curtains and generally causing a degree of hurly-burly and generalised chaos far in excess of its diminutive stature.  Trillian, meanwhile, having provided the ball and blown the whistle for the start of the whole game (so to speak) obviously felt that she had done her bit to prevent our lives becoming too boring and was spending most of the time sitting under the table watching the hilarious floor show.  Once or twice, she did trot over and join in for a short while, but in each case our little visitor managed to escape her clutches relatively unscathed.  He (or she) also escaped Glenda’s clutches relatively unscathed since, although Glenda did just about manage to grab the mouse on two separate occasions, in both cases the dratted thing got away at the last minute.

I say “relatively unscathed” there because, by around 1:25 a.m. (yes, twenty-five past one in the morning folks) we finally admitted defeat and accepted that we weren’t likely to catch the little blighter.  In fact, we were no longer even sure where the aforementioned little blighter had gone since we’d lost sight of it about a quarter of an hour earlier.  So, working on the assumption (or, at least, the hope) that it was still in the living room somewhere, we sealed the room off as best we could and called it a night.

The following morning, we let Trillian into the room first and, although she did the whole “alert cat” bit and dashed off to one or two different points in the room, there was still no sign of the mouse.  We sealed the room again during the day while we were at work and resumed our mouse-hunting activities last night, all to no avail.  Our new resident had either found some convenient exit point and scarpered at the first opportunity or he/she had disappeared off into the house somewhere.  Or possibly, following all the excitement and one or two swipes from the fine assortment of paring knives that Trillian keeps secreted in her paws, the poor little thing had found a quiet corner in which to give up the ghost and expire in peace.  We may never know.

One thing is for sure though – I’ll never be able to think of the line “There’s a moose loose aboot this hoose!” in quite the same way ever again.