Troubles come in twos and threes. The first has to do with that element without which there is no life: water. But, first, to go back a bit. In the early Sixties, The Sunday Review, now defunct, ran a poll on what the women in rural Ireland most wanted for their houses. The result had amazed those readers who no roots in the countryside, or if they had, had forgotten them. For it was not fridges or washing machines or vacuum cleaners that were top of the poll - just to have running water in the house. Mind you, the fridges etc might have come on later.
So the big surprise of thirty years ago comes home to a friend when the pump of his well goes bust. No water from the tap. No water for the lavatories. No central heating. And it's not as if he could draw water from the nearby river, even for washing. Suspected slurry, excessive phosphorous that Teagasc said on the radio was pouring into our water by over-zealous fertilising of our fields; the general detritus still may be lingering after a fish kill; these factors bid you not to touch the stuff. No amount of boiling would reassure you. So it's a two-litre bottle of Ballygowan for the tea and cooking in general and even for washing dishes. Costly. Frustrating, but at least it can all be cured quite quickly by the plumber.
The second small affliction is that you forget that the mice arrive in the house punctually with the first frost or very cold night. How they get in, you have never discovered. Their desperation for food, or their daredevilry is shown by this: a trap left over from last year, with no bait in it, somehow got pushed in behind the bookcase. Maybe there was a smell of bait off it, but nothing to see. And lo and behold it had taken a live 1997 mouse and done him in instantly. Right enough you had seen a furry little luchog happily sharing the seed that had dropped over the a feeder to the ground outside with the cole tits and others.
Twelve traps: they ask in the shop, incredulous. "Sure you can use them again and again." You can but don't. The less handling of the mice the better. Result, crude compost heap regularly throws up bits of disintegrating wood with some wire, while the small creatures they bore are dust and earth.