My fling with the thing in the attic

There is something living in my loft. Possibly a herd of somethings. And whatever is up there is drinking from the water tank and shredding the insulation.

A squirrel? A rat? As it was hailing every five minutes on Saturday and I couldn't garden I grudgingly slotted the Sixties metal ladder together and went up to investigate. First, I zipped my mobile phone into my fleece pocket, in case I needed urgent help; then once I was up there I took the fleece off and threw it back down the ladder so it wouldn't get dirty. Doh. The cat sat at the top of the stairs looking anxiously up at me; he knows my track record on ladders.

I wouldn't have this problem if I'd converted my loft in the days when money grew on trees. Everyone else in my road did. Hell, everyone else in London did. But also my roof needed replacing and I funked the whole exercise as too expensive (my roof needs replacing even more now).

So going up into my loft is still an adventure, a manly Ranulph Fiennes/I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here confrontation with spiders, dirt, defunct water tanks, a Singer sewing machine, a paraffin stove and thousands of boxes with labels like "junk books". Junk books? What idiot would knowingly move rubbish books from one house to another? Well, I was brought up never to destroy books and there weren't any dedicated Oxfam book shops in those days; plus I had worked for a literary editor in my extreme youth and acquired books on such crucial dinner party topics as human spontaneous combustion (well, Dickens believed in it... ).

Nothing stirred once I was in the eaves, of course, so there was no bird in distress. I insulated that loft about eight years ago - one of the most unpleasant DIY jobs I have ever done - so I resent the way that whatever it is has wilfully ripped the felting to pieces and tossed it around. There will be a reckoning, just as soon as I can figure out what. (For a fleeting moment I thought about carting 17-year-old Jimmie, the three-legged supermog, up the ladder to do a sweep of the territory, then I thought about what the RSPCA would think. And Jimmie himself, come to that.)

So I put sorting the loft on my (extensive) to-do list and got on with gardening for the remainder of the weekend.

I sowed Tetona spinach and Apollo rocket into pots at home (that way I get the benefit, not the slugs), purple loosestrife, destined to fringe the pond, into a seed tray, and Nigella seeds, carefully harvested from last year, direct into a flowerbed. At the allotment I sowed Wotan beetroot and scarlet kale. I would have sown White Gem and Gladiator parsnips, too, which I'd bought only the day before, if I'd been able to find the damned packets. I turned the house upside down, keeping an eye out for the spare car keys, diamante drop earrings and mascara tube that have also gone awol, but found nothing.

I think the thing in the loft may be responsible.