OK – on this occasion it’s technically DM who is the destroyer. I am just behind him, egging him on!

As anyone who’s been looking in on these pages for long knows, we live in a huge rats’ nest. It’s partly the fact that we live in the middle of nowhere, partly the fact that we’re still, more than eighteen months after moving in, trying to clear rubbish from this house and garden – as I’ve said before, we still have a couple of huge untackled areas in the garden and the loft is full of nasty stuff too.

Another contributor is the hens – because we have them, we attract rats looking for an easy meal.

Anyway, since we were completely overrun last year, and we had the man from the council out to sort out the problem….interestingly enough, he told us that before the council had started to charge for pest control ‘he’s been up to our house regularly’ – hmmm. He told us to go to the local farmer’s shop and buy bait boxes and bait, which we did. They’re quite nifty because the bait can’t be accidentally consumed by other critters but it does mean that we at least keep the ‘lid on the problem’.

I know that I am the first lily-livered, tub-thumping, card-carrying vegetarian animal rights person but believe me, if you’d been as infested as we were, you’d kill them too.

So, unlike the slugs, which I won’t poison, we do poison the rats. I’m not sure if that makes me the biggest hypocrite on the planet but there we go.

The poison we use means that we almost never see dead rats – they go off to their burrows and die in childbirth or whatever – I suspect our dry stone walls are full of rat skeletons.

However, the poison does make them desperately thirsty and so when I saw this one in a bucket full of water, I knew it was probably trying to sate a thirst brought on by Slaymore – which has to be the world’s most ‘does exactly what it says on the tin’ brand name.

The photo is of course just a crapola copy of a gruesome Lee Miller shot – in fact, it’s very reminiscent of it.

I'm very proud of last year's shot - of a family whose friendship means a great deal to me.