A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I had been to the cellar to bring up Mathilde’s draught excluders and, incidentally The Compleat Housewife. As I mentioned then, the latter distracted me from my original purpose and I spent the afternoon on my ill-fated bread and butter pudding.

The excluders remained untouched in their folded state under my desk. But yesterday there was a further drop in temperature and I could no longer procrastinate in comfort. I was reading a newspaper when the draft caught me in the kidneys. I considered briefly wrapping the sports section round my midriff like the stallholders at the Bernese market, but then I felt the chill around my ankles, too, and began to realise a whole newspaper outfit might be required. It seemed an altogether simpler proposition to tackle the curtains.

But when I placed them on my bed and began to separate them out I discovered that one of them was a cuckoo – quilted, yes, and about the right size and shape, but not the indigo or burgundy of the others, nor the same material. It was red with a broad golden band in the middle. And in the centre of the golden band, not quilted in the usual way, but cut into the top layer of cloth and then folded in and sewn to the next layer down, was a swastika.

It was not the swastika so much as the style of sewing that caught my attention. In the afternoon my mind had been freewheeling around the idea of palimpsests, and in the way of such freewheeling somehow everything that came into my orbit was absorbed into this idea.

What triggered the initial thought was a piece of paper that had been stuck to a letter I was translating, and that was clearly covering up something already written. I realised how much more tantalising this hidden writing was than the writing that had been allowed to stand. But then it seemed to me that this was true of archaeological finds, any kind of research, layers of memory, of landscapes. Then I came across the exquisite scissorings of Myriam Dion. As a partially Swiss sort of a mole, I was raised on what was called the Schärischnitt, intricate cut-outs of rural scenes. They were not really palimpsests – just black paper, usually stuck to a white background, but sometimes hung on windows as some of Myriam Dion’s are too, allowing light to shine through and cast shadow patterns on the surfaces inside.

Dion’s medium is newspapers and her stated concern is with their ephemerality – both their content and their existence as an endangered species. In one exhibition the lacy newspapers hang like net curtains, the tiny parings lying in heaps underneath. In a way this is the opposite of a palimpsest: the images are strangely highlighted, rather than obscured, by the very act of cutting away. The time she spends with, say, a cover page depicting some major event, headlined today, forgotten by the world tomorrow but life changing to all those involved emphasises its import. Painstakingly removing the content gives the stories the gravitas they need but at the same time she has made the papers more fragile, more impermanent.

This cutting away, revealing and the enormous attention to detail seemed to share roots with the cloth I found among Mathilde’s draught excluders.

Something niggled. Uncle Ratty telling me something about the Mole family (he was always a better source than any of the Moles). An ancestor, an engineer, a widower, I think, who had headed off to Panama to advise on the canal. He had a daughter, a bit of a firebrand, inspired by Bolivar, Flora Tristan and the generations that followed. She had, so Uncle Ratty said, renounced the ties to her Papa because of what she called his odious associations with the Panamanian oligarchy and run off to San Blas to join the Kuna fight for independence.

Why did this come to mind? Where had we been? I can just remember being bent over something Uncle Ratty- dusting it off. Ah yes, a well-thumbed copy of Flora Tristan’s Peregrinations of a Pariah. I remember looking at it, opening the flyleaf, seeing the inscription to said firebrand mole from her devoted Papa. When I queried the rift between father and daughter, Uncle Ratty admitted he might have got the story a little wrong, or merged it with the story of one of his own ancestors, because now he came to think of it the Papa had returned to England with the daughter – who had not been dragged, kicking and screaming but had been granted two rooms in the parental burrow to set up a press and shop-front for the influential but short-lived journal (1926-1935) Mole Libera.

Oh Lordy, how my threads get tangled. Where were they taking me? It’s true that Myriam Dion’s delicate pieces foreground different kinds of oppression and disaster, and the plight of those trapped by them, sentiments that might well have inspired firebrand mole, but I knew there was something else. And then it came to me. It was the cloth that the Peregrinations was wrapped in. This was, I now recalled Uncle Ratty telling me, a mola of the kind worn by Kuna women: layered fabric cut into patterns that revealed a different colour depending on the depth of the cut.

And it was just such an intricate form of cutting and stitching that characterised the thin quilt I had found among Mathilde’s draft excluders. I examined it more closely. One of the narrow edges had strong binding with a cord running through it, – and clips either end. This was not a curtain, it was a flag.

It took me on a serpentine peregrination through several encyclopaedias, atlases and history books, but none yielded any information. My luck only turned when I had given up and, because I was already sitting on the floor next to my larger volumes, had begun to browse through the travel section with the vague intention of finding out where San Blas was. And suddenly there, no longer bidden, was a photograph of a bakery, its front vibrant blue, and on its side, hovering over an emerald green landscape, a red and gold flag with a swastika at its centre.

Now that I had a location pin-pointed I could dig with more confidence. In 1925 there had been a revolution in San Blas, the Kuna won independence from Panama and declared the Republic of Tule. The flag was theirs. And the trigger for revolution? Moves to westernise Kuna culture, to stop the wearing of molas.

The swastika is of course an ancient symbol, dating back well over 2000 years; its meaning: the sun or light, but more often everlasting life. It didn’t last long, the Republic – only eleven days.

But the memory of it has.

The draught excluders are still under the desk.

*Links to the artworks and images are indicated in red.

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Tante Mole’s companion, Mathilde, made decisions – just like that. She held no truck with the ins and the outs of a thing, and appeared never to suffer regret once a decision had been finalised. She was a terrifying creature who still haunts me in wig and gown, casting judgement in recurrent courtroom dreams; dreams in which I am helplessly trapped in the dock. But, as Tante Mole never ceased to tell me, Mathilde’s decisions saved many lives. And yes, they may have been fast but that was because attached to a sharp mind were years of knowledge and experience.

Uncle Ratty just allowed decisions to happen – an apparently seamless transition from thought to action. It was as if there were never any dichotomy, no bicameral warring, no either or.

Great Uncle Mole could not have been more different; he was the Great Deliberator. If a decision had to be made he took a sheet of Quad Crown paper from the map cabinet and attached it to his drawing board. He would write the question to be decided in neat capitals at the top, underline it in red and then beneath it rule a vertical line down the centre. One side was entitled Pro and the other side Con. Sometimes he would just list the pros and cons, tally them up and accept what the numbers told him rather than fiddle about with qualitative detail. Sometimes he expanded his analysis with a timeline, projecting likely outcomes, one year, five years and ten years ahead.

This is all very well if a mole is contemplating moving continents, building an ark, or planning a train robbery, but the decisions I make are about scene sequences, paragraphs, sentences – occasionally just a single word. I fear putting pen to paper because once a word is written it has a presence. A sentence, paragraph or scene has even greater presence. It would be alright if I could contemplate this whole to perfection before committing it, but I can’t; so at some point I have to wrestle with changing what I have written. Changing occasionally means expanding, but much more often it involves replacing, or worse still, extinguishing, and it is I who has dominion over the words, who has to decide whether they are chosen; this mole (the one that so over-empathises with the material world that it holds its breath while washing a grape lest it drowns) that has responsibility for their fate.

Things that are not chosen continue to clamour, as I am sure I must have done as a small, wheezy foreign mole who was never chosen if ever a side or a team was selected. Mercifully, my school did not engage in sports so this did not often happen. The unchosen cast their shadows. There are more of them, than there are of those selected. They rumble just under the surface like a resentful Greek chorus.

There is of course an in-between option, when something has not yet been rejected, it just simply hasn’t been chosen, and perhaps one or other choice will just atrophy with time. It is the kind of approach that accords with the definition of politics cited by the post-war French prime minister, Henri Queuille, as the art of postponing decisions until they are no longer relevant. But prevarication weighs heavily, too; all those unmade choices clogging up the poor mole-mind.

Some say go with your immediate feeling – trust your gut, your first intuition, but I am so slow that my second thoughts turn up for dinner while my initial intuition is still wondering what it will have for breakfast.

But sometimes a decision is easier if it is thrown into the lap of the gods.

When the time came for a sibling and I to sort through the parental burrow we were overwhelmed both with a sense of intrusion and by the extent of it all: the papers, the cupboards and drawers and boxes and crates and shelves and desks and suitcases and trunks and cellars, and the piles that had accumulated in the fifty years the family had occupied the burrow. Where to begin? I picked up our late Papa’s divining rods to guide us towards a starting position. It twitched towards the parental bedroom, twitched again towards a pile covered with a large Indian embroidery. My sibling plucked the cloth away like a magician and there before us stood the biggest chocolate bunny we had ever seen. It was absurd, it was a license, it was a reward, and it gave us a place to begin.

And it reminds me now of my late Mama’s advice to toss a coin if I couldn’t decide. But that was worse than the original dilemma, having to choose between heads or tails would led me to paralysis. What if I chose the wrong one? It was only much later, long after I had left the burrow, that she pointed out that if I thought I had chosen the wrong side, it was a clear indication that the opposite decision was the right one.

Somehow I had always accepted that which ever side the coin fell sealed the fate of the decision. The idea that I could use my free will never entered my mind.

I have coins, and I still have the rods. It’s a slow process this writing when you have to rely on these instruments for every word you write.

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The other night I was awakened by a crash and a rumble, and in my rush to turn on the bedside lamp I knocked my spectacles off the trolley. I’m not sure why I woke up. Crashes and rumbles in the night are common as muck; the roof is a highway for possums. They drop from the kauri tree on to a spot just above my bedroom ceiling and then hurtle to the other side of the burrow where the wiring to my neighbour’s shed provides a useful swing onto the silver-birch. Had there been some fisticuffs as well? Was that why I woke up? I don’t know, but the long and the short of it is that having woken up I’d knocked my spectacles off their allotted spot and in spite of several minutes of groping I could not locate them again.

That is why, at some nameless hour in the middle of the night I could be found crouched on the floor, head-torch strapped on, and peering at the landscape beneath my bed. It has to be said that the torch was worse than useless in my unbespectacled state, but a coat-hanger succeeded in hooking – well quite an array of lost objects and detritus; my spectacles, too, rather enhanced by a soft furring of dust.

Something about the position I was in, the hooking, and the underbelly of the bed took me back to Great Uncle Mole’s parental burrow. Of course I hadn’t known it when he’d lived there in his youth, only as it was in mine when Pipsqueak lived there. Pipsqueak was the youngest of the brothers and had never left home; never grown up according to Great Uncle Mole who was the eldest.

As far as his attitude towards dust went, Pipsqueak might be described as the Quentin Crisp of the mole world. It is indeed hard to see a new coating of dust if the sediment already four inches thick. The dust in Pipsqueak’s burrow made a mystery of all objects and itself morphed into strange shapes that insinuated themselves into a young mole’s lungs and imagination.

Pipsqueak was quite old when I knew him, although not nearly as old as Great Uncle Mole – but he had about him a sense of child-like dreaminess. He could be found watching a snail or a raindrop or a cloud for hours on end – and the dust shapes were for him things to be wondered at, not swept away. Great Uncle Mole who regularly took round hampers, despaired of Pipsqueak and would keep our visits to half-an-hour or less and make sure we were wearing bandannas around our snouts. Their Mama, he said, was a burrow-proud mole and would have wrung her paws at the sight of the place. She had been born within tunnelling distance of what had once been the Great King’s Cross Dust Mountain that inspired Dicken’s Mutual Friend, and dust was something to be fought tooth and claw. I remember Great Uncle Mole musing once that it was a pity there wasn’t the same sort of money in dust as there had been then. Dust and ash and cinders were turned into bricks, broken crockery and oyster shells went into road-building, rags morphed into paper. The King’s Cross dust mountain was cleared to build the station and sold to Moscow for a fortune in 1848. Everything always became something else.

Sometimes it still does. Well it always does, of course, but there are times when it is done with great deliberation. The Granby Workshop makes terazzo mantlepieces from the rubble of derelict houses in a way that honours the lives of the previous inhabitants. Catherine Bertola makes carpets of dust. Paul Hazelton takes dust to craft a woman scrubbing woman scrubbing. Jim Dinglian searches out discarded bottles by the roadside and old silver-plated tea-trays. He blackens them with candle smoke and creates images by working away at the soot. James Croak sweeps up gutters in Brooklyn to build his dirt men, and Jim Bachor fills potholes with mosaics.

I had no sense of it when I was a youngster visiting Pipsqueak with Great Uncle Mole, but now it comforts me that things crumble to dust and are then brought into being again.

Links to artworks:
Granby workshop:
http://www.granbyworkshop.co.uk
Catherine Bertola:
http://www.craftscouncil.org.uk/articles/cartherin-bertola-installing-a-carpet-of-dust/
Paul Hazelton:
http://paulhazelton.com/lady-of-burmarsh/.
Jim Dinglian:
http://www.packergallery.com/dingilian/

http://www.mckenziefineart.com/exhib/Dingilian2003exhb.html
James Croak:
http://www.jamescroak.com/html/dirtman/index.html
Jim Bachor:
http://www.bachor.com/#!pothole-installations/cmwt
Great King’s Cross Dust Mountain:
http://artdaily.com/news/45957/Filthy-New-Exhibition-at-the-Wellcome-Collection-in-London-Explores-Importance-of-Dirt#.V1p-YJBkmrW

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Had you been an out-of-season fly on the wall on Thursday last you might have observed me sitting at the kitchen table crumbling bread. It had all begun with a foray into the cellar to unearth the winter curtains, a foray that ended with me staggering up the steps not only with Mathilde’s quilted draft excluders but also Eliza Smith’s The Compleat Housewife.

Its leather binding is faded and brittle; the spine, what’s left of it, is torn. I remember where it sat on Great Uncle Mole’s dresser between the cracked teapot containing the housekeeping kitty and volumes V to XI of The Practical Engineer’s Handbook. It was in no better condition then, but I suppose it had already graced one kitchen or another for over two hundred years.

In spite of the broken spine the binding is tight. The pages are thick and the type so firmly impressed you could read it with the pads of your paws. It is filled with advice on how to make liquid laudanum or concoctions to aid breeding or Battalia Pie (whose ingredients would do the beard of Edward Lear’s old man proud). But what I remember it being consulted for each summer was Gooseberry Cream, and Uncle Ratty laying the carving knife across its pages to keep them open.

A torn piece of flocked wallpaper still marks the page with the Gooseberry Fool recipe, but what seduced me was Bread and Butter Pudding. And so last Thursday or thereabouts, I was sitting in my kitchen at a table that was once my Mama’s with a loaf in front of me, just I once sat with my late Mama, crumbling bread to make bread sauce. We didn’t sit at the table I now have in my kitchen. It is a kitchen table, but the kitchen in the parental burrow was so cramped, and the table so piled up with stuff, that we had to spread an oilcloth out on the walnut table in the dining room alcove to do our crumbling.

Somehow the crumbling and the wallpaper and thoughts of my late Mama began to sadden me. I was transported to a grim month I’d been farmed out to a mole so old she must have been an aunt of Great Uncle Mole’s rather than one of his many sisters. Her burrow was decrepit and ivy grew through cracks in gothic splendour. This ancient mole did not favour nippers. Mealtimes were silent and by way of avoiding contact she decreed two hour naps after lunch. The damp, mouldy mustiness made me so wheezy I couldn’t lie down. There was nothing to read, or play with, and so during those long hours I would entertain myself by tearing off samples of the layers and layers of wallpaper that had begun to peel away from the walls. Every afternoon I’d take these samples and lay them out in sequence as if I were dealing from a pack of cards. I imagined the life of each mole entrapped in this room, counting back generations as I moved from pattern to pattern.

There is something meditative about crumbling bread between you paws. The tactility and gentle motion slows time and allows the mind to wander. I had crumbed the whole loaf before I realised what I had done.

I was not supposed to crumble. I was supposed to take a pat of butter and spread it on a two penny loaf sliced very thin. I was supposed to layer those slices with scattered raisins and currants between, pour over it three pints of cream thickened with the yolks of ten eggs, scatter grated nutmeg and mix in half a pound of sugar.

Those poor eighteenth century arteries.

Perhaps it is as well that I crumbled. I can still make a pottage of sorts but can call it something else, hold back a little on the butter and cream and eggs, and bring myself into the here and now.

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It rained yesterday, rained and rained. It thundered, too, and blustered; it broke out into brilliant sunshine, scudded clouds across the sky. Black clouds chased white and from time to time dazzling with patches of rainbow. I braved Knocklofty with a large umbrella. The creek, though not exactly gushing, was at least flowing. Dry, cracked dips were now puddles and even the frog-ponds were beginning to refill. The path, a treacherous, gravel-slippery beast during the long, dry summer, was now so sodden that the sound of my tread appeared to be travelling along little arteries just beneath the surface. It moved at a marginally slower pace than my paw-fall, so that one step was indistinguishable from the next.

A scarlet robin, returned for the winter, almost brushed my snout it swooped so close, first in front, then behind, then in front again. He was a bit of a blur because I was wearing my reading glasses, but the flash of colour gave him away. He was black, red-breasted, with white underparts.

The rain had fallen as snow on the mountain. I felt alive, woken up from my summer lethargy, replenished.

But the chill that was so invigorating on Knocklofty was less welcoming in my burrow. Although I covered my paws with thick woolly socks and clasped a hot-water bottle to my bosom, I couldn’t quite get the snugness of Great Uncle Mole’s place. Mind you, that may have just been the contrast after heroic walks in blizzard conditions.

And then I remembered the waistcoat. Or at least the memory surfaced; it must have dusted itself off on Knocklofty when I was being swooped by the robin.

It was red – Great Uncle Mole’s winter waistcoat, – and he was inordinately proud of it. His pride and the waistcoat’s rather bulky padded lining puffed him up, and it was hardly surprising that Uncle Ratty ribbed him.

‘I am NOT a robin!’, Great Uncle Mole would thunder, puffing himself up still further. But it was not the bird itself he objected to, it was the associated colour.

Now, he would have had no objection to being likened to the Tasmanian robin I saw yesterday. It is not called scarlet for nothing, although its female counterpart is brown with an orange breast, more like the English ones Great Uncle Mole was being likened to.

For Great Uncle Mole to have the colour of his waistcoat alluded to, however vaguely, as orange was an outrage.

Orange was a very inferior sort of colour.

Great Uncle Mole’s waistcoat was an heirloom. I imagined umpteen generations of grizzled old moles holding forth by the fireside, puffing out their scarlet chests just as Great Uncle Mole had done. I later learned that the waistcoat was a reincarnation of a coat, a uniform to be more precise, that had once belonged to a General. But the General was not some illustrious moleancestor. He had, in fact, been mouldering in his grave for a good many years before any molekin of Great Uncle Mole’s had happened upon the coat. A great, great, great someone of his (and I suppose a great, great, great, great, great someone of mine) was a seamstress at the late General’s ancestral pile. The attic was off limits, but being an inquisitive sort of a mole, she spent her evenings fossicking about in it. And it has to be said that from time to time she helped herself to the odd treasure. The red coat was one. She was quite brazen; boldly paused on the stairwell where the General’s portrait hung – he on horseback, in the coat and brandishing a sword. She looked him straight in the eye before slinking back down to her quarters below stairs and gloating over her find. The coat was no use to the General any more, and it was really very fine woollen cloth, – and the red! She’d never seen anything like it; just the stuff to make a waistcoat for her first-born (who cut rather a dashing figure for a mole, and had just reached his majority).

It wasn’t she but the dashing first-born who found out about the red. His paternity was a bit of a mystery and he did like to dream. He’d inherited the fossicking trait from his mama but his leaning was towards paper, most particularly towards the literary endeavours of notable figures, – personal diaries, to put it bluntly, the more personal the better. And so it was that an auction he stumbled across an archive of diaries the General had kept as a young blade.

What the dashing first-born uncovered helped him not one iota with the question of his paternity, but was nonetheless gripping to that red-waistcoated young mole – with the added frisson of being in code. When the General was his age (not a General then, of course), he was sent on a secret mission to Mexico.The voyage was perilous to say the least, not because of the weather conditions but because he had insinuated himself as a naturalist onto a French ship at a time when the French were siding with the revolutionary Americans and he, the General-to-be, was English – Suffolk-born to be exact. His task was to penetrate the Spanish plantations and steal prickly pear plants infested with with cochineal beetles, sequester them somehow and smuggle them back to England. There was a scheme afoot to build acres of hot-houses where the prickly pears could be propagated and the beetles bred. It was ambitious, indeed, this plan. The aim was to supply the officers of the British army with the reddest coats in all the world, and to distinguish them for once and for all from their faded, orangey madder-dyed subordinates.

The young General-to-be succeeded in his mission but alas the grand idea of hot-houses had failed for lack of funds. It takes a sacrifice of 50 000 beetles to make just one pound of red cochineal dye.

There was a single small harvest from the General-to-be’s venture, just enough to dye one bolt of finest wool.

Still chilled, I headed for the cellar, ploughed through a chest containing odd assortments of curtains and eiderdowns and parachutes until I found the box. It was there, intact, apart from one or two moth-holes: one red waistcoat.

And yes, here I am, tapping away at my typewriter, puffed up and snug as a robin.

*With a nod to Nicolas-Joseph Thiéry de Menonville
Mole is going on Sabbatical. The next Murmurs will appear on Friday, 3rd June.

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A few days ago I dreamt that a friend had given me a volcano for my birthday. It wasn’t a huge volcano, it was contained in a leather pouch and its base measured roughly the embrace of the trunk of a fifty year-old oak tree. He placed it on a low table and it ignited.

What did this all mean?

In my youth I was a wheezy runt of a mole and spent as much time in bed as at school. My curriculum was interrupted but my learning expanded. I was exposed to stamps; those of Mama and those of Great Uncle Mole. They were both very methodical. Their stamps were arranged alphabetically by country and chronologically within it. Their albums were uniform dark green cloth and neatly labelled. When I was with Mama we sat with atlases and books of plants and dynastic charts. When I was with Uncle Mole we concentrated more on ink types and perforations and how many had been issued and where they had been printed. Some of Great Uncle Mole’s stamps were extremely rare and he didn’t care for me looking at them when he wasn’t there because I couldn’t be trusted not to splutter on them.

But once, – I must have been convalescing and mooching around the burrow while Great Uncle Mole was working, I came across an album I had never seen before. It was quite unlike the others, rather home-made and covered with a winey-coloured carpety material, something that might have once been a saddlebag for a camel. I took it to the snuggery and settled myself in.

‘For my dear, dear Mole, with heartfelt wishes for your birthday from your ever-wandering but devoted Ratty, 1937′, was enscribed inside the front cover.

Uncle Ratty had used stamps to decorate the borders of each page, by motif or colour. On one page, for instance, he had alternated blue and yellow. A Mauritian tuppenny blue and a common-ol’-garden Helvetia 10 centime William Tell might sandwich something that looked suspiciously like a Treskilling yellow. Where a stamp didn’t quite fit he’d trimmed it.

Volcanoes, I hear you ask. What has this to do with volcanoes?

Well, the fact is that this album was almost entirely dedicated to volcanoes. It was philatelic, so Uncle Ratty told me later, inasmuch as he wanted to make Mole something with stamps, because stamps were Great Uncle Mole’s passion. But of course being Uncle Ratty, he couldn’t help but gather and enlarge and express with great, even volcanic, effusion. The theme overtook the medium. Words and labels, photographs and daubs of paint exploded onto the pages and beyond them, too, no doubt.

Oh there were stamps, too, lots of them. They had become jumping off points for musings factual and fictional. There was the famous stamp of the active Momotombo which had been sent to American politicians and scared them out of building an Atlantic/Pacific canal through Nicaragua. Uncle Ratty had added news cuttings, some volcanic ash in a small envelope, and a photograph of an old man who’d told him how Momomtombo had roared and trembled every time a Spanish priest set foot on it when the Aztecs were under the thumb of the Conquistadors.

Another page was pasted with illustrations of Le Petit Prince standing on his tiny planet Asteroid B-6-12. In amongst them Salvadoran stamps of Izalco (active for so long it was nick-named the Lighthouse of the Pacific) were stuck willy-nilly. Izalco was one of the three volcanoes shown on Asteroid B-6-12 a tribute, so Uncle Ratty had written, of Saint Exupéry’s to his Salvadoren wife.

He ran out of time and shanghaied his sister and mother. This he told me much later when I asked him about the different handwriting.

Celestine, his firebrand sister, had stuck in a lithograph of Auguste Desperret’s Le Volcan Liberté, the letters L I B E R T E spewing out as magma. The print all but dwarfed the 2 Kronor Icelandic stamp depicting Laki whose eruption in 1873-4 had so changed the climate that the ensuing chaos and crop failure far away was said to have ignited the French Revolution. And had Celestine kept the Belgian paraffin impregnated matches whose label showing Vesuvius she had added to another page.

It was on this page that a piece of rice-paper had clearly been stuck over something to conceal it. The paste had come loose – or maybe I prised it loose with a curious claw. I found, in Celestine’s hand, a gruesomely detailed account of Romans flinging live rats and moles into a sacrificial bonfire. Perhaps Uncle Ratty thought it a bit rich for Great Uncle Mole’s birthday.

But what I am most trying to remember now are the contributions of Uncle Ratty’s mother who was said to be a very wise rat, and fey to boot.

She had used every little space on a page dominated by labels extracted from Kee Chong Hong’s Volcano Super-Charged Firecrackers. Her writing was minuscule. It curved around the round letters of the labels and sideways up their sides. There was little sequencing, more a collage of impressions. And so that is how they come to me now, as impressions. The volcano symbolising the elements: earth as safety and deep knowledge; fire as passion, power and creative force; liquid flowing, unstoppable, bypassing resistance; and air, the giving of voice, broadcasting.

A volcano, shuddering and smouldering underground, can be a pretty scary proposition for a mole. Surfacing even more so. But the layers of volcanic soil that ensue are rich and rewarding.

Plenty to mull on.

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This last week has been one of recalibrating.

It all started when I took it into my head that I wanted to make a pie and began rootling about in the cellar in search of my late Mama’s old pie blackbird, – the kind that opens its beak to the sky to let the steam out. I was soon standing paw deep in wood-shavings, whole tea-sets stacked by my side; candlesticks, plate warmers, parachute silk, vases, napkin rings and tureens, to boot. Any sensible mole would have given up at that point and used an upside-down egg-cup instead, but the pie had ceased to be important, the quest all-consuming. I was about two-thirds of the way into the tea-chest when I felt something larger. There was something familiar about it, but I didn’t recognise what it was until I tried to lift it and couldn’t.

The thing at the bottom of the chest was Great Uncle Mole’s Ekco wireless. It is a beautiful object, the chassis shaped like a chocolate cake on its side, but rounded and smoothed – moulded in brown bakelite. The speaker cloth, patterned with textured triangles, stretches across a circle in the centre. Orbiting this, a dial indicates the wavelengths and once, but sadly no longer, an illuminated cursor backlit the stations as the knob was turned: Reykjavik, Oslo, Kalundborg, Luxemburg, Berlin, Ankara, Moscow.

I would watch him twiddle the knobs, refining the scratchy hiss backwards and forwards, coaxing a voice into clear articulation. He called it calibrating. I can still hear him pronouncing the word to me in his husky growl, slowly, allowing me to learn each syllable so that I could put it together as a whole: ca-lib-ra-ting.

Calibrating. I had forgotten about it, especially Uncle Ratty’s insistence that it wasn’t just wirelesses that needed to be calibrated, that we must not forget to calibrate ourselves.

I do. I forget to calibrate myself all the time.

But this week fate has engineered my life into a convergence of events conducive to calibration.

It is a rare thing for this mole to find the kind of deep stillness that allows for true listening, but it was granted to me with a day of Qi Gong in the ferny foothills of Kunanyi. The spaciousness of that listening stillness is an essential prerequisite for calibration and it was strong enough to carry me through the week. It carried over into the way I experienced my time with a writerly chum I hadn’t seen for several years. The expanse of time between then and now allowed me to calibrate temporally over a longer time. Instead of despairing at my muddling slowness I could see the distance travelled. The bumps and deviations in the middle disappeared and the distance travelled become apparent. Our conversation looped into shared passions I had forgotten, the quickening of the heart when an archival trail becomes hot, the interweaving of history and imagination, intellect and storytelling. It raised knob-twiddling questions. Am I doing what is closest to the clear articulation of my moleyself? Am I in alignment with my station now? Do I know what that station is? Am I moving through the dial to the wavelength I wish to reach, or am I floundering around Reykjavik when Moscow might be my truer destination?

Two boosters followed my day under Kunanyi. I joined my tribe at Hawarden in North Wales for virtual Qi Gong. We calibrated body, mind and breath, rocked ourselves backwards and forwards, the past and future until we found our centres and collected all our energy to focus on the present. In the background the neo gothic edifice of Gladstone’s Library glowed and reminded me of annual excursions with Great Uncle Mole and Uncle Ratty in their unreliable Morris Minor. The destination was Malmesbury in Wiltshire. We would picnic there in the overgrown grounds of Cowbridge House and then fossick around for ruins under the ivy. Great Uncle Mole had something to do with hush-hush work here in the war; something to do with radar, although no-one would say much more. Ekco came into it, too, somehow, but I can’t quite remember the connection between Cowbridge and the bakelite set back in the burrow parlour, – or the second one for that matter, the short-wave one he kept locked in a cupboard in his study and the key on a string around his neck, or so a cousin told me.

I stroked the smooth surface of the wireless, turned it around and looked more closely. There was some writing on the backing. I shone a torch on it to see if I could make it out. I found not the name of a retailer, repairer nor even of Great Uncle Mole. In my late Mama’s careful script, I read her name and the address of her Cairo posting. It was, I was sure, not only the same make but the same model as Great Uncle Mole’s wireless, but it was not his. I shouldn’t have been surprised, given that I found it in Mama’s crockery chest.

I assumed too much. Memory, too, needs recalibrating from time to time.

As I eased the wireless back back into its sawdust bedding, I felt a small lump. My torch shone into the open beak of a blackbird but it was much too late to think of baking a pie.

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Oh what mortification! Last Friday my murmurs launched themselves into the public realm before they had been fully formed. There they were, a jumble of duplications, odd spellings and other nonsense, garbling their way into the gentle minds of my dear readers. A kind chum alerted me, but just as I was poised, paws above keyboard, readying myself to smooth the words into their intended shapes, my doorbell rang. A friend had arrived for tea and then, at the very moment we were farewelling each other, the telephone rang. Three hours passed. All the while my paws itched to get back to the keyboard, and my mind was in a parallel universe of agitated readers struggling to make sense, asking themselves if I had helped myself to Uncle Ratty’s famous cherry firewater before the yardarm. Worst of all, I imagined them turning away in sorrow, never wishing to read murmurs again.

Slapdash, I heard myself saying, or was it my late Mama. ‘Slapdash’ was one her favoured soubriquets for me; that and ‘Bolshie’. Mama’s words were uttered with exasperation but oh, how I secretly savoured them. Slapdash and Bolshie co-habited with haberdashery, cutting a dash, blunderbuss and balderdash in a little chamber of my mind. They were a jolly, rackety, opinionated, swashbuckling devil-may-care bunch. They favoured bright colours, kept late hours, and played fast and loose with rules and regulations. Bolshie earned even greater cachet with the adolescent Moley when, on a clandestine visit, Great Uncle Mole’s cousin, the elderly Mr X, dropped dark hints about his activities in Archangel in 1918. It was unclear whether he was working for the Bolsheviks or the British Secret Service, but it was definitely bad and dangerous if Mr X was to be believed.

John Dryden has been credited with first coming up with ‘slapdash’. In one of his more obscure plays a character called Brain wakes up with a fully formed tune in his head (which is just as well as it has to be performed that very evening): ‘I rose immediately in my Night Gown and Slippers’, he says. ‘Down I put the Notes slap-dash, made Words to ’em like Lightning’.

Now that is the slapdash I want; the kind that happens because inspiration has run away with me and is spilling out so fast that lettering, spelling and sentences are secondary and what matters is getting those thoughts down, however higgelty-pigglety.

Over the years that chamber of buccaneers has fallen ominously silent and the whispers of slapdash and slipshod have rendered this mole paralysed at the point of exposure. Murmurs of Mole began as a way of drawing me out of my hole, committing myself to show my snout from time to time, and to waving a little something for passers-by to read.

Perhaps the garbled words that flung themselves at you last week are a sign that the chamber has reconvened, that their boisterous unconcern for finer detail and their enthusiasm for making themselves heard will, on occasion, burst through the boundaries. Will I be able to resist the force of them? Do I want to? Or shall I join them from time to time, because allowing the slap-dash its head can lead to the wonderful free-fall of words to paper ‘like Lightning’.

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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.

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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?

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