JOHN'S pride and joy, his walnut tree, or more precisely each walnut on the tree, is under attack. A proprietary stroll around the tree to show a friend the weight of the crop of walnuts revealed a tree denuded of nuts on one side (away from the kitchen window) and packed with nuts on the side of the tree closest to the house. A sneaky thief it appeared. A squirrel it turned out. Squirrel Nutkin.

Unfortunately John does not have such a cosy view of squirrel thieves. Apoplectic is a closer judgment. A watch has been mounted. Every time a skipping, frisking 'rat with a tail' is seen anywhere near the tree I am under orders to scare it off. My view is that we have to cede a nut or two to the squirrels, in the same way that I have taken some of the nuts for my pickled inedible concoctions.

It will be impossible however to watch over the tree for every minute until Christmas when John plans to eat the walnuts. In fact no one was watching over the tree at all this weekend. I was away, and John was trying to finish drilling his wheat. My trip away was on 'another' (John's incredulity) school reunion. My teenage years were spent being miseducated on the island of Malta, and the old pupils of RN Tal Handaq, are fervent reunionists. This year the reunion took place on an RAF base in Wiltshire. Heightened security on the base was very noticeable, not surprising in view of the sensitivity to terrorist attacks. The base was not in any particular danger from my friends and I though, as we seemed to spend much of the weekend wandering round the countryside trying to find the place. My friend who was navigating was wearing her contact lenses and unable to read the map. My other friend was carsick and could not look at a map without feeling ill. Neither of us had any idea where we were, and in fact found ourselves at one stage 50 miles short of London when we should have been twelve miles from Bristol. But we got there in the end, even if we did lose our way trying to get back.

A lot of talking took place, much of it on family, friends and pets. All of us owned terriers and one of my friends had recently been offered an unwanted Border terrier. As she already has two Border terriers, and the scars on her furniture and the ragged curtains to show for it, she was not interested, but thought she knew someone who would be. She rang the man in question. "No," he said "Definitely no. I already have one Border terrier, and I am certainly not having two again."

It transpired that the two Border terriers in question had been holy terrors in the house, but apparently well behaved when out. That is until one day when an irate farmer (my ears pricked up here) turned up to complain that the two Border terriers had ravaged his chickens and rampaged through his ducks. "There's nothing left of my poultry," the farmer stormed: "What are you going to do about it?"

"I'm sorry," the farmer was told "You must be mistaken, these terriers would never do that, look at them, they're fast asleep." The two terriers snoozed innocently in their bed, little faces twitching with sleepy pleasure. "I'm sorry, too," said the farmer, "But I have incontrovertible proof." (Fancy a farmer saying incontrovertible) "Don't these belong to you?" And from his pocket, he pulled two collars, plus two nametags for the two terriers in question. I wonder if Border terriers hate squirrels? We could offer it a good home.

Updated: 11:50 Thursday, October 04, 2001