Oops. Spoke too soon. Water in the quail run froze overnight. Minus 2C at 2am and snow by breakfast. Brrr. When I went down to feed the quail, they were shacked up in a heap in the thick straw with the mouse, a row of unblinking black eyes, feathers fluffed and refusing to budge. The book says they like 16C. Well, it isn’t. Try Mallorca. In London, the thermometer in the run reads firmly 0C by day, except for the hour I spent lagging and boarding the roof, when it shot up five degrees. (Ergh …) The quail shed their mufflers and pottered at my boots for the duration, basking in my exertions, happily dodging dropped hammers and occasional ironmongery. Even the mouse popped up, scampering along the wire (inside the plastic) whistling in a casual sort of way. If he’d had a cane, he’d have been twirling it. Tomorrow I double-glaze. “It won’t do any good,” says Himself. “It’s winter. They’re birds.” “You’re not thinking of bringing them indoors, are you?” says Senior Teen, looking pained.  Certainly not. They’d  get eaten – if not by the cats, then the neighbours. Christmas. Brr, humbug.

Cat watching quail - and not catching mice

Two weeks before Christmas and there’s a rose in bloom in the front garden (?). There are geraniums and periwinkle in flower by the front door and the mat on the back step has sprouted a tender lawn of tiny green tips that wouldn’t disgrace Wimbledon. The winter jasmine is a riot along the fence and the robin is back, in full throat. Inside the quail run, the mice have unpacked their deckchairs and spread their towels. The thermometer behind the clear new perspex walls rarely rises above 10C, but a small jungle has sprung up round the water stand and seedlings thrust up under my wellies like a cress carpet. Everywhere, scattered grains are sprouting. Is it spring? What happened to winter?

The mice have taken to basking in the roof, between the tarpaulin that’s supposed to keep the draughts out and the nice warm black bitumen felt that keeps the rain off. I hear them scuttling away at ear height as I open the door. One actually ran down the wire to join me in the run this morning, having evidently decided I was less of a threat than the fat feline gambolling at my heels. Catch mice, dammit!

The quail themselves, hunkered happily in mountains of rather dirty straw (no time, no time, only eleven days to go and I haven’t marzipanned the cake or written a single Christmas card, oh, my fur and whiskers…) are completely unfazed by the invasion, though they take a dim view of me lifting the hutch each morning to stamp shut the fresh holes. At least the mice burrowing beneath their tail feathers are tip-toe quiet. Oeuf and Emmet, by contrast, are clunking around like clog dancers. It’s that time of year again: dung balls. Blobs of the stuff set like concrete around their toes, requiring soaking, surgery and a stiff drink to rectify.

Roll on Boxing day.

The mouse - calmly bypassing all my brick fortifications, under the plastic lagging

Pesky mouse. The quail run is like a construction site. Think Tailor of Gloucester with shovels. Every morning I stomp down the garden like the slippered legs from Tom & Jerry, chuck a few frying pans about and stamp shut the holes - and within hours the little beast is back, tucked up under the hutch again and the millet treats have vanished, stalk and all.

Actually, the quail don’t seem that bothered. Hungry, but not bovvered. They’re laying three eggs a week – despite the cold and the dark and the lack of dandelions. Perhaps they enjoy the action.  Outside, the rain pours down.

Under the eaves, dry inside the plastic, the growing family trots along the joists and dangles from the organic seaweed mix weighing down the roof against the gales. They leave jeering little calling cards Houdini-like in tins and tubs. I looked up to find one watching me the other morning. A very young, very stupid one, admittedly, with big feet and tiny open bottom – pooping all over the wire when he realised he couldn’t remember the way out. Did I kill him? Don’t be silly.

Junior Teen feels a proprietorial interest. She reckons the mouse is the great-great-great (forty greats) grandson of the big eared, bug-eyed baby mouse she caught in our living room two years ago and released where the quail run now stands. “I feel responsible,” she says. She’s calling him Fred.

Drop dead, Fred.

Quail and snail

My Dad went to San Francisco for three months when I was six and brought me back an embroidered white happy suit from Chinatown which my children still love. All the time he was away he sent postcards – of steep streets and little open trams, and a giant Redwood tree with a car driving through it; a stack of cardboard snapshots, written in tiny neat capitals that filled every inch up to the unfamiliar US stamps. I still have them all.

Many years later, when he was fighting for his life in hospital in Liverpool after a car accident and I was marooned by his bed far from home praying for a miracle that didn’t come, I wrote postcards to my own children. Old shots of the Beatles. Kinky boot beasts and Blue Meanies.  They too were written in tiny, self-controlled script, winding round the edges of the card and right up to the stamps, because clearly that was how such things should be written, Oh Best Beloved. And until recently they lived on, blu-tacked to Senior Teen’s wardrobe door.

But now it is Senior Teen who is away and the wacky, arty postcards I bought to cheer her loneliness in a strange country lie unwritten and unposted in a drawer. The world has moved on. Texts and emails fly to and fro. She chats to her sister on Facebook and talks to her distant boyfriend by Skype.

My postcards, even if ever written, would probably not arrive before she leaves again. Once upon a time that did not deter – my sailor grandfather, criss-crossing the oceans in windjammers in his teens, went without letters for a year in 1915, but his Pa wrote on into the void, hoping the boy was still alive. In 40 years, where will all our electronic messages be? Still lovingly cherished on some elderly handset? I think not.

Yet postcards haven’t gone away, though bizarrely the internet seems to have turned the genre on its head. Here am I, at home, writing short, dense bulletins about the quail, and their mouse (which I have now seen) – still round the edges and right up to the stamp.  And there are you, reading them – some of you thousands of miles away.

A year after joining ClustrMaps I finally managed to attach the widget to my blog and overnight the empty map sprouted a rash of little red dots circling the globe: thirteen in the US, six in the UK, one in Belgium, one in Spain, one in the UAE and one in New Zealand. So far.

The quail were so delighted they laid an egg (772). I know how they feel.

The birds, the birds ... starlings gather to head south

The starlings have flown, thousands of them together. It was all very Hitchcock. One minute the great old London limes behind the gardens were black with twittering, fluttering bodies, as if all the leaves had grown back, and the next – silence – and they’d lifted off en masse into a dense thumb smear across the sky. Playtime at the school in the next street was suddenly audible again.

The quail and I just watched them go. Quail are migratory birds, too, though it’s hard to imagine this bunch soaring across Asia. Flight for Harass, Glenda, Emmet et al seems to involve an explosion of feathers and head over heels impact into the nearest hard object, whether roof (now padded) or garden fence, on the rare occasions  when one of them has got out. Only Nugget ever showed signs of wanderlust, skulking by the door as I stepped in and out. Or maybe they’ve been biding their time, plotting their breakout like prisoners in Colditz, and one day I’ll be found laid out cold in the guano, gagged with feathers, beside a trail of muddy quail prints heading south.

Poor little quail. Doomed to incarceration, and winter.

Still, they now have their own potential heat source, a mini compost heap made of stacked red plastic Celebrations tubs with the bottoms knocked out – left over from the tide of Hallowe’en trick-or-treaters. It stands in the corner like the iron pipe stoves you used to see on narrowboats, with space for the birds to huddle round when the weather gets really cold (and a stout wire base to stop the mice tunnelling in). At last, we can compost the kitchen scraps again.

As I carry my creation out to the garden, Senior Teen appears, in a trail of lights and left-on electrical appliances, to wash her hands under a running tap and overfill the kettle. She casts a pitying glance at the hacked plastic debris, hugs me and wanders off back to her parallel universe muttering something about “Borrowers“.

Actually, I see myself more as a Baldrick. This is a cunning plan. Just add worms and retire.

*With apologies to William Shakespeare

Quail in a huddle against their duvet walls

It’s cold. The quail are permanently fluffed up, huddled against their duvet jacket walls like a pile of brown pom-poms. The temperature in the run is 7C just after sunrise, well outside their comfort zone, even under two layers of plastic, but someone is still laying. Three eggs last week – 769, 770 and 771, even though daylight is down to eight and a half hours. Glenda has taken up residence in the terracotta pot.  Time to put in some more pots.

The mice are firmly in residence too, notwithstanding my best efforts. A muck out yesterday revealed two sets of holes, a snug nest and a whole crop of stolen seed that’s sprouted in the dark under the hutch. If it’s hemp we could be in trouble from the drugs squad. Meanwhile, where the mice can get in, the rats will follow. Already the ground behind the run is going soft. I stamp daily, but something is tunnelling closer…

So much for the kittens’  killer instincts. Feral, my foot. Nine months and not a single corpse. The expensive new cat flap extrudes them into the garden like toothpaste - but they ooze back at the sound of a kettle and spend their days playing dead on the sofa, growing ever bigger. To cap it all three weeks ago one of them fell off the quail hutch and broke a leg. Multiple fracture. Steel pin. Two operations. Cage in the kitchen for three months. Six hundred and fifty quid and counting, and no, we don’t have pet insurance. Thanks for asking.

With Gammy stuck in the kitchen, yowling in protest, the only quiet spot in the house is the hutch. It may be cold, but it’s quiet. Oh, so soothingly quiet. Just the rustle of small 6oz birds, sitting on my wellies to keep their feet warm. They quite like my visits - my bulk (400 times theirs…) raises the ambient temperature. Really, the thermometer cannot lie. Five foot nothing and I’ve never felt so fat in my life.

Winter is coming. Bantam neighbour’s cute Italian bees are silent, the tortoise has gone to bed. The fox cub has grown up and learned the wisdom of remaining out of camera shot – though it still shrieks at night and leaves dollops of smelly poo and chewed ping-pong balls on the grass. The robin is single again.

Out in the quail run an idea has pushed its way up through the dung and damp straw and crawled out from under the hutch like one of the mice’s leggy seedlings. How about building the quail their own compost heap, inside the fortifications? Never mind the solar lighting, with its chilly LED bulbs. Fermenting compost generates heat. Even a degree or two of warmth at night would make the quail happier. I can flatten the current rat refuge. And I wouldn’t have to dig out and trundle round the resulting compost – it can be spread around the run. Genius.

Quick. Has anyone out there tried this? Please advise.

Oh, and would whoever is googling us on the search term “black teen dick” please stop. The quail appreciate the hits (nearly 5,000), but you, my friend, are doomed to disappointment…

Nugget is dead now, too. And – again – I killed her, poor little quail. It happened a week ago, only this time it was so horrible I haven’t wanted to write. There was blood. The goitre suddenly doubled in size and ruptured, spilling intestines. I think it was some kind of hernia. I had to act swiftly but my hands were shaking so badly I bodged it. Poor, poor Nugget. Sometimes a person’s best simply isn’t good enough. I haven’t slept much since.

I don’t want to keep birds any more.

One egg today! First since Monday, so my draught-proofing efforts have evidently paid off. The run, swaddled in clear sheeting, now looks like a plastic yurt at the bottom of the garden, but the quail are still cold. The new greenhouse thermometer – dangling out of reach by the door because they disabled the old one by shoving a leaf up it (no, I don’t know how either) – reads 7C at daybreak. The quail have taken to their beds; six little brown humps, unmoving in the pile of straw. Yes, it’s that time of year again. The straw is down. Thick and expensive.

Nugget still has her ‘udder’ goitre dangling by her knees, still pink – if now somewhat splodged with dung, and I still don’t know what it is; Glenda has somehow lost almost half her feathers, ditto; and they are all off their food. Dandelions wither untouched in the litter, as six little bodies huddle together, grumpily fluffed out over their cold toes, ignoring their nice layers’ pellets, and even picking listlessly at the quail seed mix – only eating the black ones.

It is cold out of the sun by the shed. And it’s only mid October. Up at the house, a genteel struggle is already being waged over the central heating. Junior Teen and I want it off (“It’s only October” … “Save the planet”) while Himself and Senior Teen say “sod global warming, the place is freezing”. So far it has remained off, though Himself, a man of few words (“Because he can’t get any in edgeways,” mutters a colleague) has quietly switched on a portable oil heater. Senior Teen hasn’t noticed, and spends most of her study leave in her room, wrapped in her duvet. Oh, put on a jumper. Do.

But the quail really are cold, and staring sadly through the wire at the sunny garden. Could I make them tiny woollies out of stray socks? There’s always a pile widowed by the washing machine. Should I move them nearer the house? Why didn’t I build the run on runners? Or could I reflect the sunlight back into the hutch by putting mirrors along the fence? Watch this space. Meanwhile, I’ve ordered a solar-powered shed light. It won’t make the quail any warmer, but it might cheer them up – if only because the movement sensor will scare the crap out of the foxes.

The quail are cold, and bored. It is only October, but the afternoon sunlight no longer stretches into their corner by the shed. This time last year they were in low-rent accommodation outside the french windows, on the patch of scorched earth that may one day be a patio - a row of ankle-high noseyparkers watching us watching them through the glass. They were there, wide awake, when I got in at night, and back by the wire, beady eyes peeled, when the kitchen lights snapped on again at 6am. So much to see. They made friends with the robins and blackbirds, and briefly acquired a small furry lodger, until I evicted it.

These days, the only show in town is a daft cat chasing flies across the warm grass, or fishing with one paw through the corrugations in their new posh roof. The wild birds are long gone. Even the fox doesn’t mooch by any more since we mended the fence. The quail stand glumly by the wire, in the shade. Occasionally there’s a little half-hearted dustbathing, but it lacks conviction. It’s been a busy summer, 740 eggs since March, and they are looking bedraggled and end-of-season, like seaside landladies still cooking full English breakfasts in their sleep.

Quail hutch - lagged with cylinder jacket and drawing pins

Suddenly, Ouef is bald again, Glenda has lost her tail feathers, and Nugget has sprouted an udder-like bulge between her knees. It is pink and healthy looking, and doesn’t seem to bother her – or at least, not as much as me upending her and prodding it does – so I’m letting well alone. (“Murdered any more of ‘em?” was Chris P Byrd’s first question when she got back from her Greek island.) They are still laying two eggs a day between six. But they look like they need a holiday.

Ideally I’d move them back near the house, where they can watch our lives on a continuous loop like low budget daytime TV, but it would probably take me till next March to lay a second lot of foundations. And Himself might decamp into the shed in protest.

So instead a large red plastic banquette has appeared in the run, like  something out of a dodgy home makeover. Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, eat your heart out. It is of course the hutch, newly lagged in a cheap and cheery hot water cylinder jacket, and stuffed with shredded paper. Glenda seems to love it and has taken up residence on a thick pile in one corner. Though whether that is because she feels the cold - or simply to stop the others ripping out her tail feathers, I cannot say.

If anyone knows of a solar-powered greenhouse heater, easily installed, not too dear, and animal friendly, I’m in the shed, snuggled up on my new banquette.

Sunday brunch with quail eggs and the works

There’s a nip in the air at 6am, and the apple tree – usually groaning with pie-sized cookers at this time of year – is empty, knocked for six by an overdue pruning. Next year will be business as usual. For now, the raspberries are luscious and the runner beans abundant. Cherries, blackcurrants, blueberries, lettuces, potatoes are all long gone. We’ve passed the equinox and the quail are starting to slow down too. Two eggs today, though sunset may bring another. We found four yesterday, bringing the tally for the year to 728. Even the Stakhanovite bantams have their feet up this week, moulting. (Their output is so vast, Bantam Neighbour doesn’t bother to keep count.)

On our side of the fence, the family is revolting. The Teens won’t touch quail eggs any more [and larks' tongues are so last season...] To be fair, we have had them with everything all summer: from teeny weeny fried ones, like something out of a dolls’ house, to my favourite – poached, with fresh asparagus, Parma ham and pancakes. In between lie plates of boiled, canaped, scrambled and pickled quail eggs. We’ve had them as omelettes, sandwich fillings, hors d’oeuvres; breakfasts, lunches and dinners. Everyone who’s stepped over the threshold has been fed quail eggs. I’ve given them away by the dozen. And still they come. This time last year I was worrying about solar lighting to extend the season. Now I understand the point of winter.

Poached quail eggs, with asparagus, Parma ham and pancake. Yum

Yet we live in a strangely sanitised world, when it comes to food. Hands-on experience of animal husbandry has turned Junior Teen vegetarian and left Senior Teen determined that nothing passed hot and hard through a bird’s bum will ever again pass her lips. Even Himself – a dedicated follower of J. Oliver and N. Slater - would rather buy his gourmet ingredients in plastic trays from the supermarket than risk an encounter with snails, blackfly or homemade compost.

Little Brother, happily buzzing round and round his garden on his new, toy tractor, is still overrun with bunnies he can’t bring himself to shoot. Yet Toothless Granny, a former Landgirl, is blithely bumping off grey squirrels. “They’re an official pest,” she says firmly. She traps ‘em, a neighbour shoots them, and the plump little corpses go to a mutual friend who cooks and eats them. She’s clocked up six so far this year. No messing.

After Dick’s death many people commented how their grannies – (why was it always their granny?) – used to wring the hens’ necks when they were little. So what changed? Even Bantam Neighbour, my font of all things fowl, admitted that when she’d had a sick hen to put out of its suffering, she had not infact managed to do the deed – despite laying the poor creature out across three sticks as prescribed. When it fixed her with its dying eye, she’d bottled out – and nipped across the road to the local farmer’s market, to recruit an assassin there instead … heroic blag.

When did our food start to grow on shelves? And why, if we are so reluctant to kill, are we so careless about wasting what someone else has killed for us? That bean you’ve just scraped off your plate into the bin was watered and watched over and protected from pests by someone, and – at the risk of sounding like my mother – something died for that scrap of bacon or uneaten pie.

Maybe “doing lunch” should be on the national curriculum.

*

Meanwhile, I have started to lag the hutch with sheets of clear plastic. The dappled shade beside the tool shed was perfect for summer, but already the afternoon sun barely reaches the quail dustbathing optimistically in a heap at the wire, nearest the light. The cats think its a game. Winter’s coming.