Arrowing experience to fill lockdown hours

Lockdown is lifting at last and it’s fun to look back on the many projects I undertook while confined to barracks. While people across the country used the spring and summer of forced confinement to learn new languages and catch up on their reading, I learned how to make my own traps.

Forget knitting or watercolour painting; I discovered that it takes a 2p coin to counterbalance the weight of a mouse and that a stoat can eat through a wooden plank if he is angry enough.

I must confess that most of my home-made trapping experiments wound up in failure, but there was plenty of fun to be had along the way. With the exception of a rat or two, everything was released without injury or insult, and I came away from my studies with