The pictures on our walls

These are the pictures that we have on our downstairs walls.

a) One of them is the original Alison Auldjo painting that I mentioned in a previous post. I bought it with money my Mum gave me for a big birthday.

b) One of them was given to me by a friend from Glasgow. He bought it in a shop in the posh Prince's Square shopping centre.

c) One of them is a very cheap print from a shop called Alinéa, France's answer to Ikea

d) One of them is an engraving bought in an antiques shop in the Dordogne a couple of summers ago.

e) One is a Picasso print given to me by a friend who stayed with us for a few days a couple of weeks after Z was born.

f) And one of them was a present from my parents when they came over to France to see me defend my thesis and get my PhD.

So which is which? Answers in the comments. Let's call them:
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Shudder

[Mum, you might like just to skip this one.]

Scratch, scratch. Scrape, scrape. Rustle, rustle. This time it is not a false alarm. We have mice.

They're somewhere under the floorboards in our bedroom and they are very noisy. It seems that while we've been watching episode after episode of Prison Break in the comfort of our haven of a bed, the furry critters have been working on their own escape plan UNDER OUR VERY FEET.

We've squeezed poison down all the little gaps between the planks and I even invited some neighbours around yesterday evening provided they came accompanied by their cat. I invested all my hope of every sleeping again in the hunting instinct of their pet.

Unfortunately our feline saviour was visibly shaking as he came into the house. We let him loose in the bedroom and he dived straight under the bed and stayed there for over an hour until we'd finished the apéritif and our neighbours slunk home with their cowardly, useless cat. Back to square one. Scratch, scrape rustle.

Deborah sent me a link to this post in the Guardian about the impossibility of ever ridding onself of mice. Someone in the comments mentions mice repellents which emit ultrasounds so I googled that and trawled through descriptions of thousands of electronic devices. I'm tempted, but friends tell me they're useless.

You know how when anything remotely alarming happens to you people insist on telling you about how much worse it could be / might get. "Ah you're having a baby? I know a woman who was in labour for seventeen straight days and ended up giving birth to a baby with three legs". "Going to the dentist, are you? My cousin got a bug from in a dentist's surgery. His entire jaw rotted off. I was at his funeral just last week." Today at work a colleague told me "Got mice have you? I have a friend who woke up in the middle of the night with a rat on his pillow and the rat bit his face." So please, only comments on infallible tips for total and complete mouse eradication ..........please. I may never sleep again.