The other day a little bird told me she was a pluviophile. Pluvio, I thought. I knew I had come across it recently, written it even. They didn’t teach young moles Latin at my earthy Swiss school so I took the next best route and consulted Great Uncle Mole’s Oxford English Dictionary. Pluvial: belonging to rain. And yes, the niggle of familiarity was the French revolutionary calendar; the Pluviôse its fifth month, the rainy season spanning January and February.

There were several pluvios of one kind or another. It was a word that found its natural home in the 19th century. Cornelius Nicholson, a man with splendid eyebrows and great tufts of white hair either side of his bald dome, doctor of letters, fellow of the Geological Society and the Society of Antiquarians, director the Lancaster and Carlisle Railway, sometime mayor of Kendal, wrote of the butter-women in his district being ‘exposed to the pluvial elements’ in 1832. The irascible and controversial Orientalist and translator of Arabian Nights, Richard Burton, was never one to hide his erudition, even when describing the simplest journey. ‘Irritated by the pertinacious perniciousness of Pluvian Jove’, he wrote of one wet day when he was traveling along the west coast of India sometime around 1850. I should give him the benefit of the doubt. It may have been the monsoon. Across the Atlantic some forty years on the poet James Russell Lowe wrote of the ‘artificial pluviosity of the gardener’s watering pot’. But after that the etymology of the word more or less falls out of usage.

At least … Something about Great Uncle Mole’s barometer is tickling my mind. Yes, there were other weather-measuring instruments that had belonged to his Mama and Papa (known as Gamm and Gump among my generation). When Great Uncle Mole had barely been breeched they had all spent a stint as weather-watchers in the Bernese Alps. One of the instruments had been a pluviometer, a sort of funnel and cylinder. Gump was quite obsessive about reading and recording the rainfall, even when he was in his dotage. Maybe pluviophilia is in my genes.

There was no mention of a pluviophile in the old OED. Perhaps it has been driven to germinate by this everlasting dry season. What used to be the lawn, the lovely lush green-ness you see me wading through above, is now just cracked earth. It was only days after that photoshoot in early February that it was mown down. Once the mature blades of grass had gone, all that was left was dead undergrowth.

Pluviophile. Saying it aloud makes me sigh with the deep contentment of a mole who is at one with its true nature. I say it slowly. It has a spacious, melodic, watery sound to it. Even if the word does not have the authority of the dictionary, it has come into usage, and so this true nature of mine is recognised by others, experienced by others, even. I am not the the only pluviophile in the world. There is the little bird who declared herself to me for one.

As I’ve been writing I have heard a strange sound, a sort of light tapping on the tin roof of my shed. I sit on the stoop so that I can smell it, too. Drops of rain. Not many, but its a start. And the birds are chirping, too.

Sundays always drew to a close in the same way at Great Uncle Mole’s burrow. At least in the winter they did. Or perhaps I only remember them as so. After a late lunch and an interlude timed by a pipe and a crossword, we’d set off for a bracing walk, buffeted by Siberian winds, our snouts stinging with sleet or hail, and our poor paws numb and blue. Two hours later, sometimes three we were back in front of the fire, toasting crumpets and drinking hot cocoa. Afterwards, Uncle Ratty read to us from the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes or Saki. Great Uncle Mole left us to it and went off to run his bath. We would not see him again until Monday morning.

But we heard him. First the gushing taps, then the music. His gramophone sat on a shelf just outside the bathroom door. As soon as the taps were turned off, we heard the scratch as the needle touched the record, and then – you never knew quite what: Bartok, Fats Waller, Scott Jopli. You could trace Great Uncle Mole’s wet pawprints on the wooden boards in the passage between the bathroom door and the gramophone.

Uncle Mole’s Sunday night bath was a sacred ritual. The preparations began earlier when one of us, scuttle in paw, was given the task of going deep into the labyrinthine tunnels of the nether burrow to the coal cellar. But after that, responsibility was handed over to Uncle Ratty who was the only one allowed near the boiler, a great cast iron thing that spat sparks when you opened its door.

As a small mole I was envious. Not that we didn’t have baths too, but they were a quick in and out so that the water would still be hot for the next in line. Great Uncle Mole had his all to himself.

Now that I am an older mole I have incorporated the ritual as my own. I anticipate it all Sunday, and in the evening I put some music on, sometimes Great Uncle Mole’s favourites. I find myself a book, turn the taps on full pelt and pour in generous doses of Epsom salts. Always. Or at least when the weather has become cooler as it is now. This is what I did last Sunday night.

But the bathwater was stoney cold.

One winter a similar disaster struck at Great Uncle Mole’s; not so much that the water was cold, but that there was no water at all. Turn the taps as far as they would go – not a droplet. Frozen pipes you might think, but no. The water that was not in the bath had composed itself into a middle-sized lake on the kitchen floor.

I had never seen a mole quite so out of sorts as Great Uncle Mole was then. He drooped in his dressing gown and slippers; clutched his spongebag as if it might provide spiritual solace. Uncle Ratty sat him in his armchair next to the fire and corralled me into a rescue operation with towels and buckets.

It was a while before we could get hold of a new tank. Uncle Ratty brought up his old copper samovar and for the next week or so we washed in the steaming pine-cone smokey water boiled up in it.

When I faced my stoney cold bath last Sunday night I could feel Great Uncle Mole’s desolation and rather wished I had Uncle Ratty nearby.

I shrank my requirements. I had no samovar but boiled a kettle, and then another. And I remembered my late Mama telling me how the sound of the kettle coming to the boil had soothed me to sleep. It still soothes me.

And is there anything as wonderful as a bath after being without hot water for a week?

I dreamt of Great Aunt Septima last night. It had been years since I last thought about her. The details of my dream evaporated when I woke up, but the reason she manifested was, I think, prosaic; I had been reading Agatha Christie’s The Seven Dials Mystery before I nodded off. But I also think she was the manifestation of some subterranean mulling I had been doing, and that she held the answer in her paws.

I’m not sure if I have mentioned my Great Aunt Septima to you before; if I haven’t it may be because Great Uncle Mole had a great many siblings, almost all older than he and several, alas, had perished by the time I was born. But I did once have occasion not only to visit Great Aunt Septima, but to stay with her. I was eight at the time.

When I was quite a bit older Great Uncle Mole told me that according to family lore, this particular sister, oddly positioned about half way between a batch of older siblings and a batch of younger ones, extracted herself from the hurly burly collectivity of the brood and grew herself up in her own very particular way.

She came to believe that she had been somehow chosen, that her name had not just been a convenient moniker picked for their seventh child by unimaginative and exhausted parents, but rather a sign from the heavens.

It was accident that I came to be staying with her. Mama and Papa, who both worked in some hush-hush field, had been urgently called up on some mission or other. Great Aunt Septima was the only relation we knew in London and so it was on her doorstep in Seven Dials that we we landed. My first impression was that her eyes were both sharp and glazed, and that she was a very old mole indeedMama explained their predicament. Great Aunt Septima asked how old I was. ‘Seven’, my parents answered in unison. Mama placed her paw in front of my snout lest I should squeak out ‘eight’, and Great Aunt Septima decided that was propitious. ‘Seven days’, she said. ‘No more, no less.’

No-one had warned me. The burrow was a Wunderkammer of all things seven. It was crammed. Multiples of seven were favoured, from doorstops and hot water bottles to places laid at the table. The walls and ceilings were painted with depictions of the Seven Heavens. On the back of my bedroom door hung a page torn from a 1925 edition of Mahatma Ghandi’s Young India with a list of the Seven Social Sins:

Wealth without work.
Pleasure without conscience.
Knowledge without character.
Commerce without morality.
Science without humanity.
Worship without sacrifice.
Politics without principle.

My seven days were filled with instruction.

‘Your soul, young Moley, is made up of seven senses, each influenced by one of the planets. Fire is what animates you, earth gives you physical sensation, your voice comes from water, with air you can relish the food before you, the mist gives you vision, flowers allow you to hear, and the southern wind endows you with the power to smell.’

And then there were the seven stages of mole. I was transitioning, she said, into a personality of my own. I knew of course that I was not transitioning but was firmly in the next stage already. ‘The Romans tell us that the Soul rejuvenates every seven years’.

She taught me to cross my 7s, which gave the digit proper substance, she said. She’d learnt this in Königsberg while investigating the seven bridges that had provided Euler with the seeds of his graph theory (this was a bit beyond me but she gave me a map of the city so that I could see for myself whether I could find a route only crossing each bridge once). I wondered whether Königsberg was as rackety as Seven Dials.

If my mind appeared to wander she would slap a Tarot card in front of me – always the 7th card, the chariot, which she told me symbolised the need to focus, and if it wandered for longer she would reverse it. ‘That’, she would say, ‘points to an inability to see things through.’ When I was being attentive she told me I had the Chinese lucky number seven which meant I would grow to pursue a subject until I got to the heart of a matter. ‘But’, she warned, ‘some lucky sevens are too afraid to accept the truth when they discover it.’

On the Seventh day my bags were packed, and my Papa, looking distracted and slightly flushed from running, turned up on the dot of 7pm, to pick me up.

Would I see Great Aunt Septima again? No, she had done what she could to implant my sevenness. Now I would be on my own. Then she relented. I could, if I liked, come again when I was fourteen. I did keep in touch with her, a letter or two each year. Hers to me were always headed ‘7 Seven Dials’ (although it was not exactly true), and dated 7th September, no matter when they were sent. But when the time came for me to visit her again she had died, and besides, I had other fish to fry.

Apart from reading The Seven Dials Mystery, before I nodded off, I had been mulling about how I seemed to be making little distinction between my days, and wondering how to create a bit of a rhythm, time on and time off, time for one project or another.

Seven. That was it. Every seventh week I shall take a sabbatical. On those weeks mole will be silent – no podcasts, not even a murmur.

A sabbatical promises time away from the general scheme of things, time to explore or focus on something in depth; time to look at the sky as the ideas loosely construe in my mind.

I shall begin my first sabbatical tomorrow evening.

Thank you Great Aunt Septima.

It is autumn. I am cradling bulbs in my paws, and thinking about onions and stockings and Great Uncle Mole.

As you can imagine, stockings were rare as hen’s teeth in Great Uncle Mole’s burrow. Instead we used old socks for the annual egg-decorating ritual; old socks, well washed. In fact, I am sure they were the same old socks we used every year. They may have even been the ones we attached to our bedsteads at Christmas.

When I say we, I am talking about all the young Mole cousins. On any other day of the year Great Uncle Mole had to be prised from his desk or armchair to spend time with his younger molekin, especially en masse. But in the afternoon of the first full moon after the equinox, he and Uncle Ratty invited the whole caboodle over to prepare eggs for Easter.

It is autumn. I am cradling bulbs in my paws, and thinking about onions and stockings and Great Uncle Mole.

The first stage involved gathering sticks for the bonfire and ferns for the eggs. At dusk we went inside and sat around the kitchen table where the old socks, string and a basket of eggs sat ready. Clutching an egg and a piece of fern in one paw, we had to manipulate the sock over in such a way that the one was firmly pressed against the other. Then we had to delicately remove the paw and tie each end of the sock tightly.

Outside the bonfire was lit and a cauldron of water and onion skins brought to the boil. It was Great Uncle Mole’s task to lower the eggs into the cauldron of water. This whole ritual had been handed down through the ages from the great Swiss Family Mole. At the time I thought it was the whole idea of decorating eggs that had come from that clan but I suspect it was only the onions that were their innovation – onions are after all peculiarly venerated in Switzerland. And I am sure humans in Southern Africa who dyed and decorated ostrich eggs 60 000 years ago had neither stockings or onions were available to them.

The first full moon after the equinox is with us now and Easter will be celebrated on Sunday, but here in Tasmania it is the wrong equinox. Here the leaves are turning, the nights are drawing in. Oestra, the goddess of Spring has no place.

The bulbs I am cradling in my paws bridge the dissonance between my European past and Tasmanian present. I look at the pictures of daffodils, crocuses, anemones, snowdrops and tulips and as I place the bulbs into the earth I can celebrate their flourishing in the Spring.

And I am thinking too of laying some eggs of sorts, eggs containing thoughts that might quietly mature during the quiet season and be ready to hatch into vibrant being when the antipodean Spring comes.

The sound of my typewriter is soothing as rain; that tappety, tappety, tappety, ping. But from time to time, when I get overenthusiastic, instead of queueing sedately for their turn, the type bars all compete to reach the platten first – and they crunch. I have to stop and gently prise them apart with my claws.

Sometimes, though, one or other of the bars lags behind or never makes it to the patten at all. Perhaps there have been too many collisions in its lifetime; the typewriter is, after all, seventy or eighty years old now. It belonged to Great Uncle Mole, and before that to his Mama who earned her living writing about the tombs of the Pharaohs, some of whom never existed. When a type bar lags strange manifestations can appear on the page.

I don’t think it was sluggishness that prevented the x from taking up its position when I was typing the other day. It was more an elegant step back, allowing an ‘e’ and a ‘q’ to elide. They formed the word ‘equisite’ and, rather than subtracting from the intended ‘exquisite’, they managed to suffuse the word with a sense of equanimity and enhance my intended description of a day of Qi Gong.

The graciousness of the withdrawal made me consider the X in its own right. Letters are so invariably surrounded by others, positively promiscuous in the way they move from one set to the next, that I have seldom thought about a letter as an individual. What was it about the X that gave it the sensitivity to foresee what the ‘e’ and ‘q’ might achieve if brought together and dignity to allow it to happen. The X, I felt, must be a very interesting chap indeed, not only perceptive but with a character strong enough to have no fear of effacement.

As soon as I paused to think about effacement and X in one breath I lost a little of my admiration. I realised that far from being self-effacing, X was usually the perpetrator of effacements. It is the X after all that is used to obliterate other letters when I have to backspace over mis-wordings. More sinisterly still, X might mark a face in a photograph in an act of social ostracism; or replace a name when the name can no longer be spoken, as happened to my poor ancestor Molex.

But then a cornucopia of pleasurable X associations spilled into my mind; of Uncle Ratty who on one particular birthday – my seventh, perhaps, or eighth, – had sent me down to the cellar to fetch our rucksacks. He had promised me an outing but would not tell me our destination. And in my rucksack I found a scroll which unfurled revealed a treasure map marked with an X in green ink.

And there were those postcards from Uncle Ratty’s wayward sister, Celestine, in which almost obscured by a carpet souk in Cairo, or above some cafe on Paris’s Left Bank, or on a dilapidated houseboat on the Kloveniersburgwal in Amsterdam, a window would be marked with an X; and so they somehow made her flesh and blood, a real creature who was living in an identified place, not the restless nomad who seemed more story than real.

But if X is so definitive why did Descartes choose it to postulate the unknown? I like to think it was was to triangulate the positive and negative aspects of X and create a more rounded individual.

And although I know that the Greek letter Chi, from which X is derived, is quite unrelated to the Chinese Chi or Qi, I do like the fact that the etymology of the Chinese character is an exclamation of surprise or wonder, and also have a meaning of something unique, so beyond definition as to verge on the anarchic.

Next time I have to untangle the bars on my typewriter, I shall pay due homage to the letter moulded into the striking head of the X.

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.

I had occasion recently to remember that most splendid creature, the late lamented Mole of Bewsley. It all began last Sunday.

There is no other time in the week when I feel so deliciously, unabashedly molish than on Sunday mornings. There is the anticipation of a stroll down to the market and tootling on to ring the bells, to chat with chums; but first of all, and unlike all the other days when I hustle myself out of bed for an early walk, I give myself breakfast in bed.

Making my muesli on a Sunday morning is a meditative act – a pawful of oats, a strewing of sunflower seeds, a casting of pepitas, a clutch of walnuts, slivers of banana and a fling of blueberries. Soymilk poured over the lot.

And have I mentioned the bowl?

My Sunday bowl is a beautiful bowl – a hand crafted half sphere on a narrow base. It is the palest of bluish creams. Stylised robins with dusky red breasts encircle it. They are perched on branches with leaves of sage-green. The bowl nestles satisfyingly in my cupped paws. Please forgive me my flowery language, but on Sunday mornings I feel at my most deliciously moley. Molish from snout to paw, from pelt to heart. Mole in body and soul.

Last Sunday morning after making my muesli I placed my bowl on the bedside trolley, puffed up my pillows and embedded myself in the nest of doona. The sun was streaming in as it always does at that time but there was just the tiniest hint of an autumnal chill in the air, enough for me to reach for my bothy rug and sling it around my shoulders.

Perhaps the slinging was a little overenthusiastic.

The fringe of the bothy rug caught the lampshade on my bedside trolley. The lamp in turn careened and caught the bowl of muesli.

Time slowed.

The bowl ascended, pirouetting in a balletic arc, catherine-wheeling its contents.

It wasn’t quite my life that appeared before my eyes, but the friend who had given me the bowl did, and her friend the potter who had given it to her, and the journey I had taken with it in my knapsack half-way around the globe.

My 100%-in-the-present molishness began to fragment a little. The timid dormouse part of me anguished about the up-coming smithereens – the shattering dismemberment of robins. The human in me evoked ancestral guilt and chastised me for slothful habits and lapsed duty of care towards the bowl, its maker, and its giver.

Nevertheless, most of myself was right there: gasping and stretching my little eyes in admiration at the virtuoso performance of this bowl, while at the same time being it, feeling its lightness and elegant abandonment, and being the flying oats, the hurtling blueberries, the slow deliberate ever-changing shapes of soy splatter streaking through the air.

Banana slices slithered slowly down the spines of the books on my shelves. My soy-stained windows appeared to have been side-swiped by a flock of acrobatic pigeons. My boots were filled with oat droppings. Blueberries had rolled under the desk and disappeared into the pattern of the carpet. The bowl landed softly, rolled a little from side to side and then stopped, intact and deeply satisfied.

It was in the stillness of that moment that I remembered Mole of Bewsley.

You can still see Bewsley lettered on the door of a small house on the other side of this city. Mole is sadly long gone, but what an admirable creature that Mole was. Incarcerated for a near life-time under appalling conditions, Mole never ceased in her attempts to engineer an escape. In the end it was a benevolent well-wisher, himself an escapee of sorts from the same establishment, who rescued Mole and brought her to live on his estate.

When Mole first arrived she was nameless. The well-wisher, in deference to her clearly molish burrowing instincts, named her Mole. But while Mole was clearly a mole in spirit she was no mole in the flesh. Mole was a chicken.

Mole was given every attention a mole-hearted chicken could wish for in her new abode, but her years of incarceration had made her distrustful. She didn’t quite belong.

The well-wisher was sitting on his stoop one morning, watching Mole as he ate his muesli, and wondering how he might help her feel established. He was of a spoonerish bent, this well-wisher, and as he looked at his bowl of muesli and at Mole scratching about in a desultory way, it came to him that Mole needed a place of her own. That place would be Bewsley and it would be Mole’s seat. Mole would be Mole of Bewsley, from that moment on and forever.

Blackberry canes. They are a weed here. Every autumn chums come and help me pull them out. Every spring, there they are again, pushing themselves through the lawn, emerging from fencelines, invading the vegetable patch. Primocanes soar over rooflines, bow down again and re-root as they touch the ground. I am torn between admiration and despair. Wanting them gone, but wanting their fruit.

I look at the canes and know I could, feel I should, put them to good use. I hear the voice of Old Felty rasping: ‘Waste not, want not!’, and remember with a shudder trying to hide from him during my holidays with Great Uncle Mole. It was futile. With leaden moleheart, I’d await his distinctive knock on the burrow door. Dahdidahdidah (he’d been in Signals during the Great War).

‘Where’s that young Moley?’ He’d demand of whoever opened the door. If it was Uncle Ratty there was a chance I’d have a short reprieve; Uncle Ratty was nothing if not inventive about my other commitments, but Great Uncle Mole had no guile and if I was out of luck, I’d be hauled into forced labour before I’d even unpacked my knapsack.

Old Felty was a papermaker of some renown but this was little comfort to me at the time. Take a moment to imagine the most horrible job a small mole might be told to do and you won’t go far wrong. Old Felty assigned me first to cutting down blackberry canes which was bad enough but not half as painful as the second stage: peeling off their prickly outer bark until my paws were like bleeding hedgehogs.

What hurt me most of all was that I was destroying the very canes that would have produced the most delectable fruit the following year – delectable fruit that might have been picked for Great Uncle Mole’s apple crumble. In those days I thought blackberry thickets were finite – although it barely seemed so when I was under Old Felty’s rule.

Now my twinges of guilt about not immediately harvesting the canes are overridden by greed. Those that by some oversight were not dug out the previous year, sprout blossom and before the petals have even thought about dropping, tight nascent fruit have begun to form in their centres.

I begin to feel myself salivating.

But blackberries – I wish I followed their example more often; they will not be hurried. Their drupelets may look dark and juicy but if they are not ready they will cling to their stems and bleed into your grasping claws. If you persist and eat them they will be sour. If, though, you wait until they drop willingly into your paw, you are blessed with sweet and juicy perfection. It is possible to wait too long. Never eat a blackberry after Old Michaelmas Day, they used to say in Great Uncle Mole’s neck of the woods. Puck spits on them.

There is a right time for all things.

And perhaps it is the right time to venture into the cellar where there is a parcel about the size of a very thick atlas wrapped, not in brown paper, but in something that is almost cloth. It is held together in a cat’s cradle of string held into place with globules of sealing wax. A rather cheap luggage label has been tied to it. Uncle Ratty has written in barely legible ball-point:

‘For Moley. Left on the doorstep by Old Felty shortly before his death, 2nd Oct 1959.

Uncle Ratty never sent it on. I found it decades later when I was clearing out his boatshed. I brought the parcel home to the Antipodes but couldn’t bring myself to open it.

And so now I carefully lift the globules of wax. I don’t cut the string but prise open the knots with my little claw. The paper is so thick it unfolds itself. There is a frame, no two. Cherry wood, I think, dovetailed to nestle into each other. One is meshed. It is an exquisite press, made, no doubt, by the master papermaker himself. There is a note attached. Old Felty’s words echo Uncle Ratty’s but they have been written neatly in thick black ink and with a calligraphy pen.

‘For Moley, who is to be my successor.’

Somewhere in my molegut I think I knew there would be strings attached to whatever Old Felty might have left for me, and I did not want to feel beholden.

But now I can see the press for what it is, admire the craftsmanship and the quality of the paper that it was wrapped in. Perhaps I feel a pang of guilt when I see a towering blackberry cane and don’t harvest it, but I know now that I am not obliged to be Old Felty’s successor, that my path is a different one.

And perhaps he knew, too. After all he hadn’t left me the cauldrons he boiled up the bast in, nor the mallets to pound the fibre with.

Year of the Monkey has well and truly started at this burrow. Last night, a good chum and I were, virtually speaking, sitting at Great Uncle Mole’s desk, blueprints spread out before us, trying to figure out and disentangle the routes and circuits for murmurs of mole and Mole Out Loud. We were just pausing for a cup of tea when, out of the blue, the Mail Chimp zoomed past the open window. He saw the notes and scraps and trials on the desk and snatched them up just as they were. And so, dear readers, your inboxes were swelled with unintended and interjingled murmurs and Out Louds.

Should this happen again tonight or tomorrow, my apologies in advance.

Normal services will resume on Friday.