It is amazing, how much noise a few mice can make. I'd swear blind that one of them had a set of maracas, and another was almost certainly honing its carpentry skills on a cross-beam. It was basically a rodent Village People in there, but with 60% less moustache.

So far, both invasions have left me amazingly deprived of sleep and unable to function on any useful level at work the following day, so of course my colleagues got to hear my tales of furry woe. One colleague in the Melbourne office, who shall be known here as M2, offered the following � rather sound, I thought � advice (and I hope she wouldn't mind my reproducing this snippet of her email):

Make sure you set up a web cam or recording equipment behind the walls. Then I'm pretty sure you'll be able to give Susan Boyle a run for her money on Australia's Got Talent with your mouse-jam, jazz-infused sound installation fusion of domestic and industrial racket!

I have reflected on this and I do like M2's thoughts regarding the recording equipment, as well as her compelling description of the mice�s artistic bent. I may even be able to make some money out of it if I can start selling the mice's experimental noiseworks to the Belgians as postmodern jazz. I've volunteered to split the profits with M2.

Anyway, if I can get the right sort of trap in there, I�ll show the world exactly what mouse jam is.

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Things that made me happy today:

- Finally realising that the best way to read Dante's Inferno is by imagining that it's being recounted to you by The Stranger from The Big Lebowski. Works a treat with the translation I've got (Vintage Books, Steve Ellis's 1994 modern-language translation).

- Clambering into bed to type this.