In the late afternoons I often make myself a pot of tea and take a little pause in my work. On just such a moment last week, I was reclining on the sofa, drink in paws, my eyes feasting on the greenness of the new leaves bursting from the branches of the trees outside the window, when my ears tuned into a programme on the wireless.

It was about a ramble and it delighted my heart.

Uncle Ratty was the one who first introduced me to the delights of walking; not just putting one paw in front of the other, but noticing and imagining, and showing me how every single being experiences the landscape in a different way. Uncle Ratty’s sensibilities lead him to sniff out waterways, remember picnics and romanticise ports of departure. I, though, am more attuned to what is beneath the surface. As I scamper over fields, my mind’s eye traces the labyrinthine tunnels of other moles, I feel the dewy grass, and the contours of daisies, dandelions, coltsfoot and buttercups beneath my paws and, less often than perhaps it should, a shadow overhead reminds me of the perilous, nay fatal, adventure of the ancestor who was taken by an eagle.

In cities these layerings become more dense – so dense that they could become knotted and confused. But to me they are like an archive, a delicious trunk of papers – all muddled at first, but pick one paper, one thread, follow the clues and slowly each layer of the palimpsest is revealed.

Your little eyes re-imagine earlier inhabitants. Your little ears fade out traffic, and telephones, and aeroplanes, hydraulic drills and canned music, and take in older sounds the metal against cobble of horseshoes. Your snout exchanges exhaust fumes for the stench of horse manure.

In a strange place (or even a familiar one) I love being guided by a creature with a passion for a particular subject, and then again cover the same ground with another guide whose passion is utterly different. I have walked and re-walked the streets of Bern, guided by aficionados of diplomacy, folk musicians, espionage, migration, prostitution, literature, football, drainage, domestic service, landscape design and crime fiction. And after a while, solitary walks take on a a richness. Your little body feels it in its bones. The ground beneath your paws hums with those passions.

The programme I was listening to on the wireless the other afternoon followed a group of ramblers walking through Warnscale in the Lake District.* The guide has chosen this rugged landscape to create a walk that will provide deep nourishment to beings who are mourning their childlessness and the absence of a life event that they had anticipated. She has absorbed visual metaphors suggested by the landscape: a stand of dead trees, a fork in a stream, a cleft in a rock. She has fossicked through the diary entries of Dorothy Wordsworth, listened to the lore and language of locals, made connections between laboratory images of fertility and the minutiae of plants. She has drawn together features from personal maps created by childless participants. Each feature invites contemplation like the shrines along a pilgrim way where the walk’s duration, not just the features is a crucial element. The time taken and effort involved allows for the evolution of memories, feelings and thoughts of the future.

Listening to these ramblers, I felt something akin to a new dimension being revealed to me. The pause I was having in the late afternoon ventured into early evening. The green spring leaves might have ventured into autumnal brown if I hadn’t realised that my tea had gone cold.

*https://louiseannwilson.com/projects/warnscale

Sometimes a word lingers. ‘Incorporation’ lingered for long after it came up in a chat with a chum.

The first inkling I got of what a corporation might be was from Grandpa Mole. After a long and sumptuous Sunday lunch he would take a big intake of breath and, patting his stomach, would say: ‘Well, that has certainly added to my corporation’. And then he would go to the kitchen whistling ‘Three Little Maids from School are we’, and turn the taps on to wash up.

Later, as he snoozed contentedly in his armchair, I would watch his paws rise and fall on what might have been a paunch on a chubbier mole, and imagine the roast beef and potatoes, the Yorkshire pudding and gravy and brussels sprouts, the steamed lemon pudding and custard, all encapsulated in this one corporation. They were always whole in my mind, unchewed.

I was quite a small mole then, certainly not yet versed in where tiny moles came from, and I had rather imagined myself to be more or less hermetically sealed like Tante Mole’s preserved apricots. But Grandpa Mole’s corporation gave me pause.

What if I wasn’t the only creature living in my pelt? The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became. Those voices that urged me to unravel Mathilde’s knitting or try out my new colouring pencils on the flyleaves of Great Uncle Mole’s encyclopaedias were not me. Nor for that matter were the voices that told me not to eat the chocolate buns, fresh from the oven and cooling enticingly on their racks in the scullery. My pelt was fairly straining at the seams to accommodate the imps, elves and scolds who had taken up lodgings in it.

I had further pause for thought when one hot summer’s day a stoat from the village came sweating to our burrow door to take our census details. She wouldn’t come in, she said, it was too cramped, but she wouldn’t half like a cup of tea. She sat down on the garden bench with a sheaf of papers and asked if Grandpa Mole was still the head of our household.

The head. If Grandpa Mole was the head, then what were my parents? What was I? A paw perhaps. Did an invisible pelt incorporate the household. Were we all just parts of some enormous mole. And who decided which bit of body we were? I could imagine bloodthirsty tiffs as my kin vied for prestigious parts. Was Uncle Ratty were counted in? He was one of us to all intents and purposes. Would the invisible pelt reveal a certain rattishness? No one could blame him if he preferred the autonomy of being counted, head, paws and tail as the one entity that made up his nesty household on the riverbank.

It was much, much later that I discovered you could conjure up a corporation; evolve a business into a separate legal entity; become the Dr Frankenstein to your very own monster. And that if, unlike Dr Frankenstein, you took your parental responsibilities seriously and nursed your dear monster through thick and thin, that entity could become an object of pride.
My chum told me he found he felt more inclined to nurture this separate entity than he had himself.

And that makes me wonder if, when the scolds who co-lodge within my pelt get too noisy, I might be able to imagine myself into a separate, benign moleskin; one that has no components to berate me or lead me astray; one whose composition is only of encouragement.

I am very happy being a mole. I love being snug in my burrow, love being surrounded by the warmth of darkness, love delving and slowly pondering. My molishness is so encoded into my being I have barely given thought to how it might be to inhabit a different body. But there are times when I am blindly groping that I am ever so slightly aware of some other being, fluttering within me; a being that is somehow able to rise above the task in hand, see the whole spread before me. A few days ago, when I popped down to the store-room for a light-bulb, I got an inkling of who that other being might be.

But I need to begin much longer ago on a warm June day at the beginning of the school holidays. I was staying at Great Uncle Mole’s with two of my cousins who, like me, were just at that point in our lives when the lure of adventure is not yet tempered by the caution of experience.

The three of us had been warned not to go to Trelawny’s field, and certainly nowhere beyond it, but one of us, I can’t remember which, dared the others to break into Trelawney’s cellar. This was very daring indeed. As I have mentioned before, this neighbour was quite mad and had an arsenal of blunderbusses. We had heard he had a still in the cellar, and although we had no idea what that was, we knew from the hushed and disapproving tones that accompanied any discussion that the still must be a very exciting thing indeed. It was. And after we had tip-toed around the tubes and coppers and glass jars and Bunsen burners, we thought we might try the liquid contained in the bottles. I think I was the first. I gasped. Tears streamed from my eyes. My throat was on fire. So I took another gulp to show I was unaffected, and passed the bottle to my older cousin. We dared and dared each other until the bottle was nearly empty and then we left the cellar, two of us giggling and carrying the youngest, who was feeling sick, between us. We reeled out into Trelawny’s field and laid down in the dark.

The next thing we knew it was dark. Great Uncle Mole and Uncle Ratty were standing over us with lanterns in their paws. They were not alone; there were others hovering behind them. They had been out searching for hours. One said we must be suffering from sunstroke. ‘Sunstroke, my eye’, said another. ‘Those nippers are drunk.’

We were put to bed, but early the next morning, although we felt horribly ill, we were led into the parlour and told to sit down. Great Uncle Mole looked furious. Uncle Ratty seemed unsure whether to be furious or commiserate with us.

‘Three little moles went out frolicking…’, Uncle Ratty began.

‘Stop!’, said Great Uncle Mole. ‘This is my story.’ Great Uncle Mole hardly ever told stories. It was Uncle Ratty who was the raconteur; his stories so drew you in, you could quite taste the salt in your snout, shiver at the frailty of your ship tossing in the howling, black-clouded storm, horribly aware that it would take only one more breaker and your ship would be smashed against the rocks and you would end up with the countless other ships and crews whose skeletal remains littered the ocean floor. But even though you could feel and taste and smell these tales you were somehow always knew that you were home and safe and that supper would be waiting.

Great Uncle Mole’s stories, on the other hand, were bare-boned and frankly alarming. Especially when he enacted the parts.

‘Three cousins’, he said, glowering at each of us in turn. He was not sitting in his favourite armchair, but standing with his back against the empty fire-place. ‘Three cousins went beyond Trelawny’s fence and into the fields beyond, WITHOUT THE PERMISSION OF THEIR ELDERS.’

Great Uncle Mole clambered onto the armchair, knocking over the what-not and only just saving himself from over-balancing by grabbing hold of the top of the dresser. Looming over us, he went on in a voice that we had never heard – a sort of boom, punctuated by squeals:

‘High above them, far out of sight, an eagle was circling, looking out for just such tasty morsels as these three DISOBEDIENT moles. It swooped down over the field beyond Trelawny’s fence, grabbed the middle one in its sharp talons.’ Great Uncle Mole leapt off his chair, grabbing one of my cousins by the collar and falling on top of him in the process.

‘That little mole never, ever saw its parents again’, he wheezed.

The cousin began to sob uncontrollably.

‘Oh, Mole’, Uncle Ratty said anxiously, trying to help his friend up and console the cousin at the same time. ‘You can’t leave it there. You have to tell them about the miraculous rescue.’

But Mole wouldn’t and limped out of the room. Uncle Ratty followed him.

We never went beyond Trelawny’s field again.

I had heard stories like this since and always rather thought them Burrow Myths, cautionary tales tweaked to suit the circumstances. But one day not long ago I was in the store-room looking for a lightbulb and got side-tracked by a box of albums that had belonged to Great Uncle Mole. One of these was a scrap-book filled with newspaper cuttings mostly, it has to be said, about engineering feats, especially tunnels. I’m sure, in fact, that I had glanced at it before and only kept it because Great Uncle Mole had such a passion for the subject. This time though, I saw a cutting that had been folded twice to fit. The paper was yellowing and brittle and I opened it carefully. It was the front page of the Burrow Bugle, and the headline read:

‘Roaming Mole-Child Snatched by Eagle.’

At the bottom of the page there was a photograph of two small moles wrapped in blankets and being led away. The caption read: ‘Trelawny Field. The remaining cousins.’ But what really caught my eye was the photograph that took up most of the top half of the page. The camera had caught the eagle as it rose into the sky. A small mole was clamped in its talons.

It was a terrible story. And I felt a retrospective guilt that we had forced Great Uncle Mole to relive his experience with our thoughtless adventuring.

But the little other being that I sometimes feel within me couldn’t help thinking how thrilling it would be to be lifted up high by an eagle, to suddenly feel the whoosh of air, the world expanding as you rose. How much more wonderful still to be the eagle, with eyes that could take in the whole and yet still hone in on the single mole morsel below.

I did a most unmolish thing this week. I left the burrow. No sense of duty drove me. I wasn’t provoked. I decided, just like that, to up sticks, head for wilderness and spend a few nights in a teepee.

Impromptu.

Nearly impromptu.

I can see now that seeds had been sown. Two weeks ago my amanuensis withdrew all reading, telephoning, all Babbage-influenced contraptions, all messages and seductions coming through the ether. It was a spacious week, with no sense of clocks ticking or deadlines passing. It was calm. That week was a little test to see whether I could retreat while staying in my burrow, and it worked. But what I didn’t withdraw from were conversations and interactions with other beings. It was not a week of solitude.

That was one seed. The second was that I had become so emboldened by my journey to the north of the island, that I found myself toying with the idea of taking a bus to places I’d only ever seen on the map.

A third but vital seed was the unexpected loan of a car. Now a couple of particularly hairy episodes with Great Uncle Mole’s friend, Mr Toad aka The Road Fiend, had put me off motors and roads of any kind. But recently kind chums have offered me their cars, and I have used them, sparingly, to carry heavy things like bags of Epsom Salts or potting mix, or to get me to an appointment the other side of town, or to relieve myself from standing at a lonely bus stop after an evening out. This car, though, had been used to more daring outings.

And my dear neighbour offered to cater for Monsieur Boo.

Could it be that Spring played a hand in this? I felt a stirring in my tummy, a sort of sprouting seed sensation. It spread to the rest of my body and before you could say ‘Wild Wood’ my paw was on the dial and a teepee was booked for the very next day.

It was so sudden that although I deprived myself of the joy of anticipation, I also had no time for the corrosive panic of second thoughts. I cooked. I made big lists: a food list, a clothes list, a writerly list, a what-have-I-got-to-do-before-I-go list and a what-are-the-things-I-need-to-cancel list. Uncle Ratty never had need of lists. What he couldn’t fit into a small knapsack didn’t need taking. And his knapsack always was packed; penknife, torch, a bottle of stout, Captain’s biscuits, woolly socks, Sou’Wester, ginger biscuits, tobacco, maps, and his second-best mouth organ. Great Uncle Mole never had lists either. He would never have known what not to take, and he was such a hoarder he was happier staying at home in his burrow surrounded by all his home comforts.

The back of the car was spacious. I could indulge my Uncle Moleishness and pack my bothy rug, hot water-bottle, a jigsaw, my pyjamas, a teapot and tea cosy, coloured pens and the enamel mug my dear Mama bought me in Prague. I could take a bunch of daffodils and a vase and a bowl of mandarins and nuts, and a sturdy nutcracker thrown in. And perhaps that is all I ever really need to feel at home.

And then I took to the road. Broad and open at first, it became narrower, steeper, twistier, bumpier and wilder the closer I got to my destination. I could feel a little squeal of song coming on, a distant relation of the Shadows”We’re all going on a summer holiday’, I think, except that I remembered it as ‘jolly’; much more to my liking than’summer’.

The teepee was at the end of a winding mossy path, defined by dark green shrubby trees. It was not just any old teepee but had a covered porch with a table and a couple of chairs. It was a teepee with a wood stove and a fold-out bed.

It was a beautiful teepee but it did not begin to be my own until I had lit the fire, put the daffodils in a vase, spread the bothy rug on the not-yet bed, and made myself a pot of tea. It became more mine as I sorted the jigsaw pieces by the light of my head torch in the evening, but most of all it became mine when I woke up in the morning to the sound of wrens and honeyeaters. And nothing else. I was the only mole there for miles and miles.

By day I packed a bag with notebook and pen and my lunch, and explored the ancient mossy rainforest. I slithered in the mud and clambered over trees that had come down in the heavy snowfall in the winter. I got lost and found myself among huge man-ferns and gushing waterfalls. At night I lay on my back in the dark and gazed up to the skies, gobsmacked by the constellations.

I had gone to the teepee to write – but it was really only on the second full day there that I began to find my way into it, and on the third I had to leave. But it was so much more than just a place to write, undistracted. As I drove home to my burrow I could sense a bit of Mr Toad suffusing my mole body.

What I had just had was an adventure!

Last Sunday I was at the market buying my favourite brew (black tea with roasted barley and ginger), and I got chatting to the chap behind the stall. It was the last day of winter. A chilly wind was blowing off the mountain and the air was soft with fine drizzle. He and I were both rugged up and beanied. ‘Beanies’, he said. ‘Where’d you be without them’. He said he wished you could have a beanie for your life – something snug and warm that you could contain it in.

Winter does that for me. It insulates. Long darknesses encase the day. Beyond the tunnels of my burrow brisk, cold walks invigorate my body and feed the soul, while the burrow itself and the hearth within it shape my internal world. I light a fire and make myself a pot of the above-mentioned tea. I find a book. I put a record on the gramophone. A bowl of walnuts and a nutcracker are positioned within easy reach. I wrap Uncle Ratty’s herringbone bothy rug around my shoulders, ease myself into the armchair and put my hind paws up on Great Uncle Mole’s Egyptian pouffe. Winter is a time for resting, musing and incubating.

We have had such a good winter this year: a number of frosts and even a snowfall. It has been cooler for longer, but still I am not ready for the spring.

I am not impervious to the new season’s loveliness. Today winter and spring, day and night are perfectly poised. This morning I set out in the still cool morning. There had been a frost in the night. It was not pitch dark. There was the slightest lightening of the sky already. It was a deep indigo and the stars were still bright. By the time I reached the reserve it was light enough to walk by the half-moon. The crunch of my paws scampering over twigs and leaves was accompanied by early birdsong, chirpier than it has been, trilling even. As the sun rose its beams caught the trunks and leaves of the gum trees, and the bright yellow of wattles in full bloom punctuated the needly silhouettes of casuarinas.

And September is such a delicious word. It’s the mb, I think: ember, embed, jumble, crumble amble, mumble, amber, rumble, tumbler, limber. Until recently, all my associations with it have been joyful. It is a yellow month. In the northern hemisphere it is filled with yellowing leaves and fields of sunflowers, and here, not only the wattle but daffodils.

My unease with the oncoming of spring is a manifold thing and perhaps I would do well to unravel it into its component parts of memory, time, season, and my own little mole body.

For most of my life this month has been filled with celebrations of birthdays and arrivals. Now those anniversaries are tinged with traces of death, departure and loss, although no longer enough to extinguish the warm-heartedness of September.

But while I am happy to embrace September on its own, it has undeniably foreshadowed the last quarter. It has felt like the beginning of the hurtle towards the year’s end which held for me the sense of life passing, a time of reckoning, a judgement on things intended but not done.

In the past as I have moved into spring and summer, boundaries have become porous. Spring has whispered distractions. My mind has leaked and and scattered. The unease has grown with the relentless increase of daylight hours, the march towards the glare and heat and noise of summer. A queasiness has infused me. My brain has begun to melt. Concentration, inspiration, focus, calm, and quiet energy have become distant memories.
It might have been the imminence of spring that made me yearn for the the breathing space my amanuensis so kindly imposed on me last week; a breathing space that made moments stand still and gave me a sense of space and quiet. I wonder whether this removal of distractions, this reduction of things to be absorbed might be a way of taking the sting out of the hurtle.

Maybe I could hold each month as I do September – as an entity with its own particular attributes, distinctive from the previous or the next; find some way to celebrate it in its own way. Or I could take a broader sweep and look forward to summer as the foreshadower of autumn and winter and beanie containedness.

And perhaps I could take my walks earlier and earlier so that it is always dawn when I reach the summit.

There is a little spring in my step on Fridays. Not because it is the end of the week but because it is time to nudge aside the tome and ponder on the stray musings that will travel to you as murmurs. Friday is Murmurs of Mole day, but not this week, it seems. What should I have found when I tootled into my office on Monday but a little envelope, propped against the typewriter. M.O.L.E, it said, as if the letters of my name stood for some sinister multinational company or secret society. The note inside, faultlessly typed by my amanuensis, no doubt at a cracking 70wpm, told me that after all the excitement of the journey north, this week had been declared a Breathing Space. My amanuensis is terrifyingly strict in such matters and brooks no contradiction. Concentrating on the tome is allowed, even encouraged, but no books, no wireless, no films, no murmurs.

And so, dear friends, this is all there is this week. Any more and my amanuensis might think I am murmuring. Meanwhile I do encourage you to take Breathing Spaces. Perhaps I shall mull on them in my next post. Same time, same place.

I am packing. My ticket is bought, my boots are polished. From time to time, but much less frequently now, I hurtle around the world to where night is day and summer is winter, and visit my ancestral fields. Between those journeys I am a homey sort of mole and define my boundaries by the distances my hind legs are willing to venture.

The journey I am embarking on today is not an epic one. Not geographically, that is. But it is on several other fronts. Its prospect brings up a funny feeling in my chest, a bit like a choppy sea and for the last week or so I have been trying to disentangle the flotsam and jetsam it has churned up.

One of the reasons for my choppy state is the journey itself: things on wheels – especially on highways, give me the heebeejeebees.

The other is the destination. I am travelling to a place of my past, a place I was reluctant to move to, and eager to leave. At first I feel that I have no memory of my time there, just a sense of unease. Then I sense that the unease of that time is brought on because I allowed expectations of the outside world to shape me. The creature inside my pelt had been a numbed thing, not me. But from this I can see that it became a time of transformation with all the prickly discomforts and mistakes inherent in trying out new pelts. And as I remember those hapless but momentous times, I remember some of the joys. My purpose for today’s journey is joyful, too. I am heading off to the other end of the island to celebrate my Sprössling’s graduation.

This is a graduation hard won. An immense challenge to start out with, this endeavour incurred set-back piled on set-back. Each time she dusted herself off and started again and now, years later she has achieved what she set out to do.

It is only recently that we are learning that is the struggle that develops our abilities, not the binary measurements of success and failure that blighted schooling in the past. When I was a young mole we were lined up at the front of our classroom each week according to our academic achievement. I was near the bottom. In the gym class we were lined up by height and I was at the bottom. I failed even at growing. In the schooldays of Great Uncle Mole and Uncle Ratty I imagine there were even harsher methods of ignominious comparison. Although not for Uncle Ratty’s sister who was taught down river at a dame school. What a dame. An ancient otter with a wall eye, she would only teach the offspring of canal and riverfolk – and Romanies. Her charges were untethered by boundaries and somehow knew they would make their mark in the world. Now neuroscience can show us how the brain lights up like a Christmas tree when it is set a challenge: the greater the challenge, the struggle to work out the problem, the more neurons fire up, new pathways are forged. The brains of those who solve problems quickly are only dimly lit.

There is no room anymore for the concept of failure. It marks the soul with a thick line of finality. And I am thinking that if it is a bit of a struggle to venture on this journey to a place where I had a different life, then it, too, provides an opportunity to fire up neurons and forge new and stronger pathways.

This place, the other end of the island is where my graduand Sprössling is making her home. Who knows, there may be more Sprösslings to come. Would I allow the path to my molekin to atrophy by shying away from the challenge of a journey?

I shall still my turbulent chest, open my little moleheart.

Do I need a snack for the journey?

When I was small, just old enough to to take gleeful pride in being able to read, I was farmed out to a family of pious moles near the Welsh border. The days were long and wet and the highlight of the week was a visit to the church. Unlike the burrow, which was bare and chilly and gloomy and dim, the church was cheerfully whitewashed and the walls were decorated with biblical texts framed in colourful painted borders. The one I could see best from my spot in the pew was ‘Cry aloud, fpare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet and fhew my people their tranfgreffion, and the houfe of Jakob their fins.’ I never expected to understand all the words and I hadn’t known that humans had fins. But as I sat pinned between the adult members of a family which held firmly that small moles were to be seen and not heard, what had my little lungs swelling with emotion was the exaltation to cry aloud and lift my voice like a trumpet. From that moment I knew I could be wildly transgressive on the inside and no-one would know, and that words could change how I felt.

So perhaps it is not surprising that from time to time have the urge to plaster the walls of my burrow with advice to myself: in text, but perhaps also in images. The kind of advice might vary a little, but just now it is about the little matter of delaying gratification.

I have been battling with myself recently. I am not sure whether it is I or Myself who begins the argument, but one of the two is all for staying snuggled in bed, and the other can imagine the glorious sunrise from the top of Knocklofty. Snuggled-in-Bed closes its eyes and ears to the coming day and the stiffness and inertia brought on by inactivity. Sun-Rise knows that inspiration comes on the Knocklofty heights, that the brain will be clearer, the body more limber after an early morning walk.

I have seldom seen the tension between instant and delayed gratification manifested more clearly than in the filmed studies based on Walter Mischel’s marshmallow experiment. Small moles are left in a bare room. They sit at a table with a marshmallow in front of them and they are promised a second one if they can hold off eating the first for fifteen minutes.

I can feel their battle so keenly I almost become one of them as they pick up the marshmallow, look at it, smell it, turn it around, put it down, pick it up, put it down again, look at the ceiling, hyperventilate, squirm, pick it up again, squeeze it, put it to their snouts, put it down again, put their heads in their paws, hum, make faces, turn away, sing, tap at the table.

But what if we are talking about more than the fifteen minutes for the marshmallow, more than the day of the walk. How about a year or ten? Two things have to be in place for such self-discipline: the abstract idea of future reward, and trust that it will be granted. Or the abstract idea of something negative in the future if we don’t do something to mitigate it now. But this abstraction cannot be vague. It has to be so strong visualised it feels utterly real.

When one small mole was unable to stop herself from eating a marshmallow, Mischel suggested she try again but to imagine a frame around it. She held out, and when asked why she didn’t eat the marshmallow she said it was because it was a picture. There was something about this observation that unsettled me in the same way as Magritte’s ‘Treachery of Images’; his painting of a pipe captioned ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’.

This is the encouragement I want to paste to the wall of my burrow: something that represents that small mole’s strength of vision and willpower.

‘Ceci n’est pas un marshmallow’.

I have an ageing postcard propped up against the lamp next to my bed. On its face it has a reproduction of a tomb painting depicting Osiris, Anubis and Horus. I have the postcard propped where it is not because of the image – the printing is so rudimentary it appears pointillist, but because of the message, a piece of text cut and pasted on the back:

‘Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us a dusk’. Written in a bold hand with a thick black pen there is the acknowledgement: Jean Paul Sartre The Devil and the Good Lord (1951). There is no signature but I don’t need one. This is my one and only communication from Uncle Ratty’s sister. Her visits to Great Uncle Mole were infrequent and seldom coincided with mine. In fact I could count the number of times I’d met her on one paw. ‘She finds us fearfully dull’, Uncle Ratty once told me. He was much older than she. I thought her one of the most intriguing creatures I’d ever met. She had studied at the Sorbonne just after the war, and kept a base there but was rarely there. She did something elusive that took her to places like Egypt, Vienna and Shanghai.

The postcard has been leaning against my lamp for so long now that I often forget it is there, but just recently the quote has pierced me again. Each morning I wake up to a new day and begin the struggle of uniting the creature who resides in my moleskin with the mole I’d like to be. I have to confess, though, that from time to time I mistake attributes of the ideal mole for my own. It can then come as a shock when a fellow creature draws attention to the gap. My first reaction might be a sense of outrage that this ideal moleself has been so impugned, although the greater my sense of outrage, the more I know, deep in my little moleheart, that the admonition is justified.

It was not really an admonition, just a sad statement of the status quo as perceived another. Had a friendship so dwindled, this dear one asked, that it was time to move their tendrils of friendship to more fertile ground?

It can be tricky being a mole with a solitary streak, one so quickly overstimulated in company and taking so long to re-find equilibrium. And I sometimes fall into thinking that nothing I can give to a friendship can ever be quite enough, and so it is safer to hole up in my burrow.

To be found wanting as a friend rattled me. I tried to recall something I read once, something about how tempting it is for us mortals to avoid the instability of our boundaries, our unsettling status as a work in process. So we fix upon some definitive sense of self and try to hold ourselves to it, rather than to courageously embrace the changes.

I wanted to find more about this and wondered whether it, too, had been Sartre. I trundled down to the cellar where I knew Uncle Ratty’s sister’s copy of Being and Nothingness was in one of his trunks. I remembered her flinging it across the room in disgust one Christmas because the translation was so bad. The book was in bad shape, not only dog-eared (she always folded the corners of pages to mark them), not only filled with underlinings in emerald green ink, and indecipherable marginalia. I should have remembered, given the postcard beside my bed, that any passages she had found pertinent were cut out entirely, so that when you held the book upside down by its arthritic spine, lacy paper entrails drooped beneath the cover.

But there was something about the anarchic vandalism of the book that cheered my little moleheart into braver living. I can see that without nourishment tendrils will atrophy, and I shall venture forth and cherish an important friendship.

And as for Uncle Ratty’s sister, I haven’t seen her since her brother’s funeral decades ago. She might be still alive, a grande old dame in some Paris apartment. I shall make it my business to find out.

I had the strangest dream last night. It may have been the Shropshire Blue that I polished off before I went to bed; that and my excursion to the archives to fossick through the documents newly released by the Foreign Office and MI6. The long and the short of it is that I dreamt that Cousin Ezekiel had shot Mr X.

I’m not sure why I haven’t mentioned Cousin Ezekiel before. I suppose I didn’t see him very often, but that doesn’t mean he left no impression. He turned up every year or so with a carpetbag. My late Mama called it a Hebammekoffer because it was the kind of thing midwives carried about. Cousin Ezekiel was not amused at this; he was very particular about his appearance. He dressed like a conductor and had even somehow managed to part the pelt on the top of his head. There was some debate in the burrow about how this might have been achieved. Uncle Ratty said he was sure it was Macassar oil, and Great Uncle Mole saying that Macassar oil might work for parting rat fur, but for parting mole pelt nothing short of varnish would do the trick.

I remember on summer mornings when we ate breakfast in Great Uncle Mole’s little garden, how Cousin Ezekiel buffed his claws and then blew the dust off in short, sharp puffs. He kept the buffer in a velvet pouch, drawn close with a tassled drawstring. Buffing at the breakfast table irritated Mama, but I would try to will Cousin Ezekiel to devote his concentration to buffing from the first flick of his coat-tails as he sat down to the dabbing of the last crumb of toast from his snout with the starched napkin kept solely for his visits. I wanted him to keep buffing because as soon as he had drawn the strings of his pouch closed, he would adjust his pince-nez, lean forward on the table with steepled paws and interrogate me about my dreams.

Now there is nothing quite so private to a young mole as its dreams. All its waking life is somehow under adult surveillance. But in the nest, eyes closed, the young mole can slither into a deliciously chaotic, inexplicable world of impossible feats, and wild adventures. I only once made the mistake of acceding to Cousin Ezekiel’s demand. He hooked the tail of my dream, reeled it in, and then dissected it for the entertainment of the assembled company, speaking of me in the third person as if I were not there. His spoke his words sharply but with unusually long silences between each one. And with mitteleuropean confidence, he delved into the deep flaws in my nature that the dream revealed, the traumas I had suffered, and my illicit desires. After that experience, I made my dreams up.

You may well be asking yourself about the chap who was shot. On the whole, we don’t go in for first names in the Mole family. Cousins were cousins. Of course naming moles by relationship becomes problematic because they change according to where you hang yourself and them on the family tree. To be quite honest I am a bit vague about whose cousin, Cousin Ezekiel was. Not mine. I don’t even think they were my Mama’s. Great Uncle Mole’s probably. What would that have made them to me? Once, twice, thrice removed? No matter, the reason Cousin Ezekiel had a monitor was because he had a twin and we had to find a way of referring to them separately. Although fortunately they seldom came to the burrow together. They were highly competitive and a game of Monopoly would have them at each others throats before the first card had been dealt

Cousin Ezekiel’s twin was as elusive as Ezekiel was probing. When asked to select a name, he said that X would do. Cousin X, someone ventured, I think it might have been Mama. No, Mr, he had said firmly, Mr X. And when, map enthusiast that I was, I brought out an atlas to get The Cousins to show me where they came from, he cut off Cousin Ezekiel’s reply and said: ‘Ruritania. Find that if you can’.

Mr X existed in a state of high drama. He always arrived unannounced and late at night. He wore a cape in all weathers, outside and in, and hogged a position in front of the fireplace whether it was lit or not. His visits to England were inevitably associated with some mission or other, or so he said. He was a great raconteur. And he would launch into tales of the danger he was in, but then stop in mid sentence and cite the Official Secrets Act. ‘Hush-hush, you know’.

Why did I have my dream? Cousin Ezekiel would never have accepted my mundane explanation of the Shropshire Blue, but he is not around to offer an alternative. But I am glad I had it, because it has reminded me that between them the cousin sowed the seeds to my current trade. Cousin Ezekiel forcing me into falsifying dreams, and Mr X forcing me into inventing the endings to the dramatic tales he never concluded.