If the mice have to face my wife, they’ll have only themselves to blame

I was in bed by one o clock on New Year’s Day. We did the countdown thing, for the kids, and then hung around for a while looking tired; it was only later, when my wife and I were upstairs in bed, that the real fun began. A long and corrosive argument about the mice, probably the 15th we’ve had on this subject since we moved in back in August. We could both hear the mice downstairs, whooping it up, holding some sort of shindig of their own; the relentless skittering across the stone floor tiles or the parquet wood blocks in the living room. I was tempted, at one point, just to shout downstairs: ‘Keep it down a bit will you, we’re trying to get some sleep up here.’ My wife, listening to the sounds of revelry — just wait until they work out how to use the CD player — turned over and said, full of contempt: ‘So much for your bloody entente cordiale.