There was a bit of a domestic here last week. It took place in the nest atop a large ash tree at one end of our property, and involved Daddy Jay persuading spotty teenager son Jay to get the hell out of the domestic home and on his bike.

Jays are pretty, but very noisy and aggressive birds. They ‘CAARRKK’ at each other about the slightest thing, but on this occasion the volume was enough to get our two terriers going on a barkathon.

This is the way it is with animals. Tiggy and Foxie bark, so Monsieur Morgue’s hunting dogs (he breeds them by the dozen) think it’s feeding time, and begin howling in that solemnly deafening way hounds have. That in turn sets Morgue’s peacock off, followed closely by his goats. Because the goats invade our land from time to time, this acts as a further air-raid siren for our two, and the yapping goes up another notch. It’s enough to make a chap want to be deaf.

“I’m going to the Ovaltineys” said my wife the other day, “Are you going to marry the chicken?” Going deaf doesn’t have that much to commend it: Jan was saying she was going over to check Leo and Tini’s house (they’re away) while wondering if I was going to marinate the chicken breasts for supper. But what I heard was something quite different: it seemed rather like the sort of conversation I imagine went on in Casa Dali all those years ago. It’s a constant pain now to keep asking what people have said, and yet be able to hear the dogs perfectly. Their warnings about approaching goats are obviously aimed at the remaining 20% of my aural spectrum that is still functioning.

Frogs are another animal capable of piercing the most damaged tympanic membrane; and the truly odd thing is, the smaller they are, the louder the noise. We get these tiny bright-green things here, but they sound like amplified bassoons with hiccups. Get one inside the house, and there is no sleep until they are located and evicted. They tend to hide under the pool cover, so when you roll it out there is much hopping about in panic. For Tiggy this is irresistible, but the combination of frog speed and treading on water means she just winds up frustrated.

Things are more satisfying for our younger terrier when it comes to the rockery I’ve been constructing for quite a few years now. While monitoring this endeavour, she can sniff about while I’m planting up, and then dig the new arrivals out again. It doesn’t matter how hard I try to explain that this isn’t some kind of Easter Egg hunt, Tiggy will eject everything I half-bury until her master says “LEAVE IT!” This is the command I use to get her out of the dishwasher when loading dirty crockery. It may sound masterful, but actually it has been drummed into her by the use of good old-fashioned blackmail: no exit dishwasher, no more treats before bedtime.

I made the mistake on starting the rockery project of saying to a chum who lives nearby that I was short of good rocks.

“Ah” he said, a sadistic gleam in his eye, “I’ve got tons of them at the bottom of our field”. I won’t go into the detail of what this apparent generosity produced: suffice to say that I’m told the hernia will heal up one day. But the damage to the Peugeot’s sub-frame was of a different nature.

After this experience, I decided it was easier to dig the rocks up myself. Such is the composition of our soil in these parts, good limestone turns up at regular intervals: as in, whenever one sticks a fork in the ground. And when I tire of digging rocks up, there is always wood to chop.

As an Irish friend said to me recently, “Using wood for fuel warms you up twice”. I can vouch for the truth of this: the sweat you build up splitting logs provides damp warmth until such time as the sun goes down, and then the choppings can be bunged on the flames to heat you all over again. I wonder what the climate change lobby would make of all this: I am recycling a replaceable fuel form on a site where I’m producing it faster than it’s being burnt….and using my body energy to conserve supplies prior to using them.

The reason why normal views on responsible ecological behaviour don’t apply down here is easy to explain: there’s very little industry, and the density of population is 5% of that in the south east of England. There’s a lot more wildlife in our petit coin than in the Home Counties, but on the whole they don’t build coal-fuelled power stations, and as they’ve yet to invent medicine, the reproduction is kept within reasonable bounds. Also, most people have a well to augment their piped water.

The one exception to my animal reproduction rule is the mole. It must be a miserable existence living underground in damp soil, and perhaps this explains why Mr Mole (despite being a solitary species) just keeps on multiplying. I think it’s got something to do with tunnelling away for 55 days out of 56, and then encountering a lady mole. There isn’t a lot else sensible to do under those circumstances other than have sex. Whatever: we have little eruptions all over our plot. Mrs W has summoned the mole killer. She is determined to rid us of this pest. But when the traps go clang, I can guarantee she will be elsewhere.