DO you recall Jacob Marley, a ghost in Christmas Carol, who clanked into Ebenezer Scrooge's nightmare to remind him of the wrongs he was committing?

Well, I fear I will soon be haunted. Not because of any miserliness, I don't think I can be accused of that, profligacy on occasions, but miserliness no, but because of great crimes I have committed against our local mouse population.

It all started when John reared a small flock of partridges in the grain store for a friend who runs a shoot. The partridge chicks were first housed in a shed under infra red lights and them progressed to a run outside, but still inside, the store.

The partridges have now gone to be released in the fields and wood that the shoot shoots over, but one of the legacies of their habitation in the store was a thriving community of mice. All pleasantly plump from the good eating they had been provided with by the ad lib game feed crumbs.

Millie, our Jack Russell, longed to get into the grain store and chase and snap up the mice, but they soon learned to evade her by nipping under the shed floor or into the partridge run.

From where they demonstrated the equivalent of a "yah, boo, sucks" snub to an enraged terrier.

Once the partridges left and the grain store cleaned out for corn from the harvest, the mice seems to disappear.

There was a brief killing spree when the floor of the hut was lifted by the tractor's forklift, but then the mouse population apparently disappeared into thin air. Or did it?

John had put down a bait station behind two of the freezers I had sneaked into a corner of the grain store as I had no room for another one (or even two) in the pantry. But although the poison seems to be being taken, not a sign of a deceased mouse.

But behind and under all the fixtures and fittings in the store, clear evidence of a mouse population explosion was beginning to accumulate in the form of a multitude of mouse droppings. And with the tip up of corn now in the shed from harvest, drastic action was needed.

So I raided the loft rooms where a number of mouse traps are always set in case we have little visitors and baited five traps with prime Red Leicester cheese. Next morning five little mouse corpses, each one parted from this life with their little jaws clapped round a morsel of cheese.

Next morning another five. And then another. Thirty mice so far this week and then this morning, only four mice and one trap completely disappeared.

I have searched high and low. Under the freezers, under John's work bench, behind where the partridge shed is stacked (in pieces) and everywhere else I can think of in the store. Not a whisker.

So tonight when my sleep is disturbed by the shuffling, rattling and scraping of a mouse trap across the bedroom floor, I know who it will be. The ghost of Jacob Mouse.