‘Excuse me, I’m looking for something to catch a mouse that won’t cause it any distress,’ said the young chap who had walked into the hardware cabin at the farm shop with his girlfriend.

The pair of them had briefly perused the shelves where the well assorted pest control items were neatly stacked and, not seeing what it was they were looking for, they had approached the counter where the owner and I were having a chat.

We were setting the world to rights, as usual, as he put through a bottle of floor cleaner for me, and we had come to the conclusion we always do, which was that we wanted to get away from it, whatever it was. But even if we knew what it was, where should we go to get away from it? Right on cue, the voice of today spoke to clarify at least half of this conundrum.

‘Excuse me,’ said the young lad, ‘I’m looking for something to catch a mouse that won’t cause it any distress.’

The hardware store manager, not normally the sort to be thrown by awkward requests, said: ‘You mean you want a live trap?’ The lad squirmed. His girlfriend appeared to swoon, then staggered from the shop as though about to faint. The boy said: ‘No. I want something that won’t distress the mouse.’

‘Look, there are two types of mouse trap,’ said the hardware manager. ‘One kills the mouse, the other traps it alive so you can release it. You want the live trap?’

The girlfriend was wandering across the car park with a glazed look on her face. Possibly she was going to keep walking until she reached Islington, where everything would no doubt be better for her. The boy went on, in a hushed tone: ‘I need something that will catch the mouse, but not cause it any distress while it is inside the… er…’

As he stood there, going all limp and metrosexual and triggered, suddenly I understood. He was looking for temporary mouse accommodation. He was seeking commodious arrangements to enable the repatriation of a rodent while affording it all its rights during the time it unavoidably had to be detained.

As the hardware store manager led him back to the shelves, I imagined a little whiskered creature sitting on a sofa with its feet up on a coffee table inside a see-through box. He was half watching a miniature television, while flicking through assorted tiny magazines. ‘I can’t believe they haven’t got a phone in here,’ the mouse muttered, for he could see his mobile lying just outside the room he was trapped in, having been tempted in there by a plate of cheese.

What was humane about this? He would have to wait all night until he could call Mrs Mouse. But no matter, because as soon as the idiot boy let him out of the box into the garden he would go straight back into the cellar to retrieve his iPhone. Of course he would. Did the boy think the mouse was stupid?

The boy wandered back to the counter with a small see-through mouse-trapping container he was holding in the air while asking the manager whether it was right for the size of mouse he wanted to politely encourage to leave his house, or whether the mouse would be too cramped in this box, where he might have to be held against his will for several hours.

The manager had lost patience and was ignoring him. He turned back to me to talk about where he and I were going to go to get away from all this.

But I couldn’t concentrate, because I knew full well I had been harbouring a mouse in my own cellar, and I had not put any form of trap down because it peeped its head out and wiggled its whiskered nose at me.

I let it stay there. It burrowed into the dog biscuits and ate an entire sack of Chudleys Working Crunch. It started on the flour and the sugar until I had to seal every item in the larder in Tupperware.

It got stuck into the dish cloths. It nibbled the scourer pads. I told the builder boyfriend to do something, but he didn’t do anything.

I begged the spaniels for help, but Cydney and Poppy refused. Cydney slept in her basket right next to the cellar door where the mouse was popping out each night to eat her food. ‘That’s my pet mouse, that is,’ was what the builder boyfriend claimed she told him.

The mouse lived high on the hog until one day I found it dead on the patio. ‘O-oh!’ I heard myself say. I assume the neighbour’s cat took matters into its own paws. Either that or poor mousey collapsed after bingeing on all those J Cloths.