THE pretty awful weather of late has had one positive for me in that the housemate has allowed me to avoid the lengthy commute up the garden to my home office in favour of working from ‘home’.

Obviously I’ve become too comfortable with the endless supply of coffee and the loo close at hand so this week I’ve made the move back into what colleagues describe as my ‘cavern’.

Despite trying to explain to fellow editors on our daily meetings that it only seems dark because I sit in front of a huge window they remain convinced that I’ve been banished to some subterranean cave beneath Abergavenny.

“Unless you’re actually going to a proper office on Tuesday you’ll have to work from your office because I’ve got the WI coming round,” announced the housemate on the weekend.

“You can take all your stuff up now and it’ll be ready for you,” she added glaring at the pile of papers which had accumulated around my chair.

Moving the pile of paperwork to its new home, I noticed something slightly ominous of the floor of the office.

“Is that mouse poo?” I asked the housemate.

“How do I know?” she replied peering at the pellets.

“I think it is.What do we do about that. I’m not catching them in a trap. I’m not arriving at work to clear out corpses,” I said firmly.

“You can get those humane traps where the mice wander into a tube looking for food and the door closes behind them,” she suggested.

“I’m not using one of those,” I replied. “I had a horrible experience with one of those when I was a student.”

Looking at the mouse removal options, my mind wandered back to the dark ages when a group of friends and I shared a student house in Bangor, which to put it politely was less than salubrious.

As we sat in the kitchen one night we noticed a strange noise emanating from what passed as the cooker.

Plucking up our courage we opened the door to find a sizeable mouse trotting around on the tin foil which lined the oven shelves - put there by the landlord to be energy efficient.

Unable to catch the mousey house guest, we christened her Brunhilde  and for a few weeks she became part of the student family until we finally decided that having a mouse living in the cooker probably wasn’t the most hygienic of situations.

“I’ll get of those humane traps,” announced one of the vegetarian housemates who balked at the thought of doing away with Brunhilde in a more brutal manner.

That afternoon we carefully placed the humane trap in Brunhilde’s oven stamping ground, confident that by the next day she would be trapped and in a position for us to safely rehome her.

Sadly we forgot the share the information with the residents of the neighbouring house, who frequently broke in to use our oven thus saving themselves costly electricity.

Suffice to say Brunhilde enjoyed her last Ride of the Valkyries that night and I was put off humane mouse traps for life!