Always carry a spare – nearly always!

Anyone who knows my husband will know that one of his favourite sayings is “always carry a spare”, and he carries it out to the letter, always having a spare for just about anything. So when I saw bird food on special offer I took his advice and bought extra, putting one in the cupboard in the outside out house as a spare – of course you guessed it I forgot all about it.

While looking for something else I found the spare bag of bird food, with a neat hole bitten through it and, and I kid you not – the lot was eaten, all that was left of a 5kg bag was the husk of the seeds; but left in its place was piles and piles of mouse droppings, two shelves full and not detected before because the cupboard doors were closed.

It had got in the cupboard behind it and through holes that once housed drain pipes because the cupboard was an old sink unit with a false top on, it is now thoroughly cleaned out and sprayed with an anti bacterial spray I didn’t find the culprit, I am glad to say, I did the job with the door wide open in case it was there and wanted to escape; the surviving bags of bird seed are now securely fastened in tins and plastic lidded containers.

We had a spate late last year of our security light constantly going on and could not find what caused it until one evening by chance we saw the culprit a mouse doing an acrobatic act across the clothes line, we thought he was going for the bird food on the garage roof where I feed the birds, little did we know he had his own private stash!

And the moral of this story, always carry a spare, as long as no one else wants it too!