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.

Follow

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.

Follow

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.

Follow

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.

Follow

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.

Follow

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.

Follow

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.

Follow

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.

Follow

Here in the southern antipodes we are just coming to the end of our glorious fruit season. There is something about the ephemeral nature of these seasonal fruits, – raspberries, greengages, apricots, blackberries, peaches, damsons, nectarenes, mulberries, gooseberries, – that makes me gorge on them, delight in them while they are here. I love them all, but most of all I love the cherries.

We moles are terrible hoarders, but these fruits rot if they are kept.

And so I am eating a cherry for each item tossed. I am unhoarding my burrow to make more space to breathe, more time to take delight in what remains, more room in my mind, a move towards more flow in and out of my burrow; in and out of my molebody.

I don’t really remember cherries much from when I was a wee mole in England- they were a very, very special treat. But in the early days after we moved to Switzerland, I remember all the more an outing we made to Chronberg.

The departure from our home burrow and our nearest kin in England had been a tearful one but Grandmama Mole, who lived heartfirst and had endured more than her fair share of departures, composed her bravest face. We had relations in Switzerland, she told us. Distant, it was true, but through them it was possible to trace our lineage back to the Romans.

Tenuous, Great Uncle Mole interjected, sotte voce, and received a scowl from Grandpapa.

The clan was called Muulwürfli Ursprung, Grandmama went on, ignoring them both, – had been called that since the beginning of time. And (this was said in a dramatic hushed whisper), would these moles have a story or two to tell! Switzerland was a small country, she said. We should drop by – but to be sure to wait until late summer.

In the scheme of things, Switzerland is a small country, but not for moles. One hot day we walked, caught a bus and then a tram and then three trains and another bus to get to Frick. We tramped on to the village Oeken Oberdorf. Even then, we still had a long and dusty climb up the Chronberg. I might have balked but luckily the Chronberg was more of a hill than a mountain – and more luckily still, the cherry orchards (which by this time were a far greater lure than the ancestry), were clearly visible.

Several of the Muulwürfli Ursprung clan were waiting for us at the edge of the orchard. They had a cloth on the ground, put out bowls and bowls of cherries. They plied us with Kirsch, home-distilled. We had worked up such thirst coming up the hill that we drank far too much of it – and me such a wee mole, too.

Their accents were thick, and Papa did his moleful best to converse and translate back to us, Grandmama’s prediction that there were stories to tell, was amply proven.

Members of the Muulwürfli Ursprung clan had lived here since before the Romans brought the first cherry trees from Anatolia. The cherries might seem a boon now but the Legionnaires had settled a major camp, run roughshod over molehills, shaking the ground with their thudding feet and collapsing the tunnels of our forebears.

The story went that two Muulwürfli sisters decided enough was enough and they set up several cells of similarly minded moles in the area and orchestrated the gradual death of the settlement’s economy and a revolt within the army. Every night for several years, the moles would burrow under the treasury and steal the coins, newly arrived from Rome, that were destined for the pay of the soldiers.

What did they do with all that money, I asked, thinking about what I would do if I were so rich. Mama frowned at me. In our family it was considered bad form to talk about money. Filthy lucre, Papa called it, but nonetheless he translated.

The grizzled old Muulwürfli who had until now been telling the tale with toothless glee, looked serious. The sisters, he told us, had wanted to distribute the hoard among all the Chronberg moles, but when they tunnelled to the burrows where the coins had been stashed, the coffers were bare.

There was a lot of bad feeling, each clan accusing the others. It was generally felt that the sisters, having got all the other moles to do the heavy work, had pulled a fast one. It wasn’t true, the old Muulwürfli said, the sisters lived humble lives. But the Muulwürfli Ursprung clan became outcasts, until recently only allowed to live on the periphery of the Chronberg. Now, though, after all these centuries, they had reclaimed their ancestral burrow.

It was dusk when we departed. It would be past midnight when we got home. The Ursprung clan gave us bags and bags of cherries to sustain us on our journey home.

Today I have been feeding myself cherries to ease the flow of my dehoarding. The juice is dribbling down my pelt just as it did then. But it is not just the cherries that have precipitated me into telling you this story. The other day I stumbled across a news item.

A farmer in Chronberg, tending his cherry orchard, had seen something strange in a mole hill. He dug a bit and found a coin, and then another. Fifteen kilos of coins were uncovered – over 4000, – newly minted, dated between 274 and 296 AD. It was hard on the map to see exactly where this was but I could have sworn it was where the grizzled old Muulwürfli Ursprung had pointed out his burrow. Had he known all along – but kept the hoard? Had he died not telling his heirs – who then, in their eagerness to extend the burrow for their ever increasing families, had dug the coins to the surface without recognising what they were?

I like to think that it wasn’t the sisters who kept the stash, but that it was taken by less scrupulous members of the clan, who kept it until the broohaha died down – except it never did. Perhaps they gloated over it, but they could never cash in.

Is this a little morality tale tailored to me? Is it to remind me that hoards that aren’t allowed to breathe and move on and find new outlets are ultimately useless and only clog up their custodians?

That is not to say that I will not keep the treasures that hold the stories of my clan so that I might recount them here.

Follow

Sometimes I ponder for days about what I am going to write. A stray word seen or spoken, the odd observation, or maybe two or three jostling together, and one thing will lead to another until I discover what it is that I want to say. But there are other times when I am distracted and forget to lay myself open to the seeds of inspiration. I become paralysed by the terror of a deadline and forget to lose myself in the delicious riches of my cellar.

I sit here, pen in paw, hoping that the first word is inching its way through the endless circuitry of my body. I am barely unconscious of its origins; have no sense that it is aware that I have a timetable. It dawdles, hovers somewhere in my gullet, loses itself in bye-ways, is lured into conversations with other words who are arguing about which is to go first. None wants to lead. I am waiting this end for it to arrive – have been waiting for some time. Will I recognise it when it arrives? Will we embrace? Will it be a complete stranger? Will it thrill or fall flat on its face?

How does a word reach a paw? How can I jolt it along? Papa paced up and down. Like a tiger, Mama would say. The threadbare track on the turkey rug bore witness. His words when they came flowed, exquisite, poetic, but rare. Mama’s came to the fore through sheer force of will, but were prosaic when they arrived, having been marshalled on command and not been allowed the time to build distinctive characters.

Great Uncle Mole always typed. The machine was essential, a big and heavy thing that clacked and pinged, a mechanical intervention between his body and the paper. Watching him, one might almost believe that the letters on the hammers conveyed themselves to him before his paws had even hit the keys. something mechanical and external to himself.

Uncle Ratty was a verbal chap – could spin a yarn that lasted for weeks. A tale might be serialised night after night for the whole stretch of a holiday and on the last evening all the threads were drawn together for an astonishing denouement. But ask him to write so much as a shopping list and he froze. He needed to talk himself around a thing to bring it to life, not pin it down.

His sister, Celestine, who had a higgledy-piggledy education at the barge school had no such qualms. The barge creatures were given so much roaming time, so much license to paint and mull and shout and sing bawdy songs, that Celestine knew no limits when it came to writing – nor anything else. Her pen, filled with green ink, excelled at all she touched and, oiled and fluid, made its way through three doctorates as she lived and loved her way through Paris, Barcelona, New York and Berlin.

I sit here trying channel her, or if not her any one of the others. I feel the words getting stuck en route. My words are neither marshalled, nor fluid, they are not to be coaxed by mechanical intervention or green ink, or lulled with whisky or wine or chocolate. I try to send them messages of encouragement but they are timid creatures, too frightened to emerge. The word-in-the-making I am waiting for – and its pals, – are more comfortable in that amorphous place where anything is possible; before letters have coalesced into words and words have coalesced into sentences.

If they come out they might be pounced upon before the quill has even scratched the paper.

Follow