I have rather been missing my chum, Morris. It is during Morris’s absences that things tend to go horribly awry.

Last night I lay in bed willing myself to sleep. Of course, the wiser mole knows that the more willing one does the less willing one is. But I was not being wise as I stared into the darkness, my tiny eyes glued open, I was too dazzled by the floodlight that was penetrating every recess of my mind.

The light did not distinguish between the muddles of the past and the terrors of the future, the important and the trivial. A lost sock demanded the same gravitas as an apparent deadline, rotting apples lay stalk to stalk with a major crack in the wall of my burrow. Time was flattened into one overwhelming present.

Somehow, in the last week or so, I lost sight of the fact that I was a mole. I was too much around humans and the busyness of their lives, had attempted to emulate, catch up and then keep in step instead of moving at my own molish pace. I was lured by their glitter, their accomplishments, and their offerings. I forgot that I could pootle about in my own cellar and find nourishment from what was there.

I blame this unsettling behaviour on these muddlesome days between summer and autumn when the summer self that seeks after new things converges with the gatherer for the hibernatory months. What happens is that in my seeking I deplete my energies, become diffuse. What I bring back is unnecessary and only clogs my mind and burrow. I am neither able to resist the temptations nor bear the consequences.

After an hour or so being being dazzled by the over-exposure of my mind, I turned on my lamp and reached for the comfort of my bedtime book. Conan Doyle’s leisurely writing, his evocation of a slower time usually has a calming effect on me, but I had barely begun when I found myself squirming. I had reached the point when Dr Watson is trying to get the measure of the man he is about to share digs and Holmes begins to expound on the brain, his own brain primarily, contrasted with that of a fool. He might as well have poked me with a ferrule and told me that by fool he meant yours truly.

A brain, he said, was like an attic. It was to be furnished with discrimination, and stocked only with what was absolutely essential for the work it was intended to do. Each of these items would have its own logical place, easily retrievable – like the seating arrangements of old Simonides’ poor dinner guests.

‘A fool, Moley’, Holmes said. Or perhaps he didn’t, but that was what leapt off the page at me. ‘A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across…’. Everything useful either gets crowded out, or is lost in the a jumble.

I could see that I was behaving as if the walls of my own particular attic had the pliability of squirrel’s cheeks. And even if they had been infinitely expandable, there was no circulating space. The attic was stuffed to the gunnels and still I was trying to stash in more. Not just the attic but the cellar, too.

At some point I got to sleep and when I awoke it was autumn rather than summer, so dark I needed a head torch to find my way up the hill. The torch picked out single features, a rain-drop glistening leaf, a fern, a quoll. Each was exquisite by itself, would have been lost in the daylight.

When I returned to my burrow I discovered Morris had returned. The table was laid for breakfast. The kettle was boiling. A teapot lay waiting.

We talked about attics and cellars, and what might or might not be there.

Such a memory palace under that pelt, said Morris.

If only you looked.

On these hot, last-gasp summer days I have been reminded of Great Uncle Mole, too hot in his pelt, mopping his brow with a large red kerchief. It seemed at the time like something only an old mole would do. It went with the deck chair that always came out after lunch, and into which he sank, his clothes rumpled and that same kerchief loosely covering his snout, rising and falling as he snored.

I don’t have a deck chair, but this afternoon I caught myself mopping my brow and had two simultaneous thoughts. One was that I must now be just about the age Great Uncle Mole was then, and how good it would be to have a little afternoon nap. The other was much more visceral; it was brought about by the sensation of the slow movement of my paw across my forehead.

Suddenly I am a very wee mole indeed. It is night time and I have been put to bed. I can hear some wireless music coming from the small room next door. My Papa has come in with a kitchen chair and sat himself next to my bed. This is an evening ritual – or at least it is when he has caught an early enough train to get back from his work. Or perhaps it is only at weekends.

Our first repertoire is A.A. Milne. I know the poems off by heart – have known them since as long as I can remember, longer even.

‘There were Two Little Bears who lived in a Wood,
And one of them was Bad and the other was Good…’.

Absolutes are so comforting. But as I parrot the words I begin to think about them. I think about that paragon, Good Bear and how there is a Good Moley who I am meant to be, except I never am. Every time I grasp one good bit another drops off. I am never complete: it takes more vigilance than I can muster to hold the bits together. Does this mean I am condemned to be Bad Moley?

Because I can sense something intrinsically unfair about the judgement on the two bears – Good Bear is praised for a facility in reciting the times table, Bad Bear is vilified for dressing untidily. Being a mole for whom numbers remain an enigma and coat buttons never ever line up, my heart bleeds for Bad Bear. I feel in my whole being that bear’s haplessness in the face of trying to match – not only an ideal state of sartorial elegance – but a perfect paragon, the impossible Good Bear.

I am still parroting but as we approach the middle of the poem I can feel a stirring, somewhere near my wishbone. Because ‘quite suddenly (just like Us), one got better and the other got Wuss’.

Oh what a delicious reversal of fortunes.

Papa, perhaps sensing my excitement and hankering after his pipe and wing-chair and beating himself at chess, hastily moves on to stage two – poems that have memorable turns of phrase but are less likely to keep me awake

‘The houses are blind as moles’, he’ll say in a Welsh sing-song voice quite unlike Dylan Thomas’. ‘(Though moles see fine tonight in the snouting, velvet dingles)…’ . At some point, Papa will begin to stroke my brow, but only if I am completely calm and close my eyes and don’t speak.

And I so love feeling his gentle paw on my brow I determine to stay awake forever.

But he is a mole of clever strategies and many voices. He moves on to – well it is usually Keats, – and he puts on his best hypnotic voice:

‘O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close,
In midst of this thine hymn, [Moley’s] willing eyes,….’

And now, all these years later, when I am old enough to mop my brow like Great Uncle Mole, I still find I think of myself as incomplete Good Mole instead of just me – just Mole.

But I never, ever barracked for Good Bear.

Give me Bad Bear every time.