Lockdown Letters: Isolation happiness from a squirrel picnic table

“In prison, a man will do almost anything to keep his mind occupied,” says Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption. In lockdown, my husband built a squirrel picnic table.

It took him a little while to find the wood - eventually, a chunk of pine from a skip near our house delivered - and an hour to saw and glue it together. There was some debate over the design. Do squirrels prefer a deep seat, we wondered, or something narrower with a bit of height at the table? What about some sort of cup holder for the food? Should it be drilled into the top? Could they reach their little squirrel paws into it from a sitting position? Have we gone completely insane?

I became a gardening obsessive a couple of years ago. Though ours (so lucky as we are to have it, I know) is about the size of a SingStar booth, Monty Don is right when he says it’s amazing how much you can cram in.

The week before lockdown, around the time everyone was getting cross about loo roll hoarders, I wheeled a flat trolley around Homebase piled up with compost, summer flowering bulbs, Phlox, Saxifrage and wild strawberries.

In lockdown I’ve become the plant equivalent of a helicopter mother, hovering over beds looking for weeds, attacking the creeping buttercup with a Hori Hori or lopping off dead tulip heads.

Last year the gardening became a sort of gateway drug to bird feeding - once you’ve made the place look nice, you want some wildlife to come and hang out.

A couple of years ago the only visitor was a fat wood pigeon, and he was just passing to the cherry tree next door. Now we have a steady stream of tits, dunnocks, wrens and goldfinches to pick at the rolling buffet of fat balls, sunflower hearts and niger seeds. As I write this, a little goldfinch fledgling is splashing around in the bird bath.

“Are you aware you’re becoming that feed-the-birds woman in Mary Poppins?” a friend messaged, like an intervention.

But until recently we had not welcomed the squirrels. We threw away two ‘squirrel proof’ bird feeders over the winter when one chewed through the wire and (I suspect) lay below it like a fat roman emperor with his mouth open as the peanuts poured out. Another ripped the plastic bird perch off entirely and greedily plundered the contents.

Eventually, I bought a ‘squirrel baffle’ - an extremely naff plastic dome that covers the feeder and prevents them from descending down on it like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible. I also invested in a spring-loaded seed holder that closes when something larger than a songbird jumps onto it.

But perhaps because lockdown has done strange things to our brains, or because there’s only so much weeding a person can do, or we’re craving any company we can get, in lockdown we did a 180 on our squirrel war and built the table.