Ghosts in the attic 21 September 1997

I live in a small lodge house just north of Hemel Hempstead. It's about half a mile from the nearest neighbours, in the middle of a wood, and during daylight hours is very tranquil. As soon as night falls, however, the place echoes with thumping, scrabbling and scraping sounds, because night is when the resident rodents come out to play.

These aren't your average house mice. By the sound of it, these things wear hob-nailed boots and shop at Noisy Power Tools R Us. One in particular has perfected a method of scurrying under the floorboards that sounds exactly like someone dragging a dead body up the stairs. We tend to cower under the duvet, hoping they won't notice us, imagining ourselves coming face to face with one of the R.O.U.S.s from The Princess Bride. At least, we did until today, when we finally met one of the culprits.

It was about 4pm when I looked out of my kitchen window to see something small and grey moving about. At first I thought it was a small bird, but when I looked closer and saw two button-black eyes and a small furry tail, I realised that we had found our rodent. Trying unsuccessfully to climb up the brick wall of the lodge, and generally looking very confused to be out in daylight, was a small specimen of glis glis, the Edible Dormouse.

We have two species of dormouse in this country. The Common Dormouse is a small brown mouselike creature, native to Britain but very rarely seen. The Edible Dormouse is an invader from France, and is larger, grey, and (as I've now found out) famous for living in very noisy family groups in houses in our particular area of Hertfordshire. It's also exceptionally cute.

I'm not a big one for small furry rodents myself, preferring scales or feathers for some reason. But I have to admit that our Edible Dormouse could have been designed for the next Disney movie. Apart from the eyes and the tail, it had small pink feet, a twitchy nose, and an endearing habit of curling its tail right up over its head when it went to sleep in a small box we found for it to rest in. When I stroked it gently to see if it was OK, it barked out a machine-gun cough and glared at me resentfully, but made no attempt to bite. It was the Grey Squirrel's fluffy kid sister; a pink ribbon tied in a bow around its neck would have been over-egging the pudding, and wouldn't have noticeably made it any cuter anyway.

So, come nightfall, we put the bugger on the roof and watched it scamper back through a hole into the attic. It, and its family, still keep us awake at night with their noisy rampaging through the infrastructure of the lodge, but somehow we don't mind as much now we've met one of them, and found out what a pleasant family we share the house with.

Two photographs of the infant glis glis outside the lodge.		The rodent on the roof, and back to join its family.