I unwrap my presents.

“Pants!!!” I cry, delightedly. “New pants!!!”

Honestly, it is the best birthday ever. I have been given a set of four (including one free, which is a good bargain) ‘briefs’ by my in-laws, who like me very much and weren’t at all disappointed, suicidal etc. when I got together with the LTLP.

They are extra large in size, which is better for the health of your testicles, and different colours so I can mix and match depending on what else I am wearing of a day.

“I thought,” explains the LTLP, “that you could now chuck out some of those old pairs.”

I give her a suspicious glance, like a man who has just come downstairs in the morning to find a giraffe in his front room watching Channel 4.

The LTLP has a track record in trying to get me to upgrade perfectly good items of clothing. I do not wish to wear tatty pants every day, but there is a time and a place, and if you wear old pairs occasionally (if you are not going out, or your vegetables are not due for delivery) then you save wearing out your new ones and can keep them for best.

We discuss this, but she is not on receive mode, and rolls her eyes a lot.

When we toured round New Zealand I took a lot of old pairs of pants with me, and instead of having to wash them, I just left a pair in every town. That meant I did not need to carry them home on the plane, and was a good use for old pants. I might decide to go to New Zealand again at some point, and would not want to throw away good pairs.

I open the rest of my presents (3) and scuttle upstairs to put my pants away in my pants drawer. If I press them down really firmly it just shuts.

I have been de-moled!!!

To recap:

When I had my little issue with the rabbits (now resolved), I was quite happy to shoot them. This, I explained in various emails to appalled rabbit-lovers, was because I would then cook them and eat them.

I am not sure why I expected this to mollify or reassure appalled rabbit-lovers.

But my point was that I’d have felt bad otherwise. Killing something just because it messes up your garden a bit seems a little harsh. But I have no problem with killing for food. Otherwise I’d have to be a vegetarian. And I couldn’t be a vegetarian because I really, really enjoy meals that don’t just consist of vegetables.

Except chips. And jacket potatoes with cheese and beans. And foie-gras.

So I felt a bit bad about the mole. But it had reached the point of no return.

I can’t eat mole. I am a red-blooded male, but I can’t eat mole. I don’t know how you would have it. I guess spatchcocked on the barbecue, or maybe just chucked in the blender then into a milkshake.

But the mole was sort of commuting between our gardens, and had been digging more furiously than Ron Atkinson on the comeback trail.

Keith gave us some advice. He is a local man and drives a van, so should know what he’s talking about. Apparently it’s no use trying to bash a mole on the head with your spade. What you have to do, is dig in beside it, then flick it out of the ground into the air. As it lands, you then hit it on the half-volley through the covers.

Let’s not go into details. All I can say is that I hope Short Tony has a clear conscience. He is clearly a very evil man.

In the afterlife he is going to be really in the poo if he turns up and God is not a man with a beard at all but a HUGE GREAT BIG FUCK OFF MOLE.

I am sort of guesting today, being part of A Free Man in Preston’s super but everso slightly sinister dream sequence.

I did not write anything yesterday, in solidarity with the other important journalists who were on strike.

Thinking about it, I should have posted a repeat.

This piece of writing has lots in common with the BBC, being supplied to you high-quality and advert-free. Admittedly, I don’t do a £500,000 redesign every six months or employ twelve people to analyse the site stats and produce glossy reports, and the comments don’t all begin ‘why oh why’ and aren’t moderated by Anne Robinson, but aside from that it is pretty well exactly the same.

It is an anxious time for our national broadcaster. There are arguments that it is not worth funding, as the commercial sector can produce telly programmes that are just as good. People who point to the dumb stuff on ITV like ‘Celebrity Love Island’ are just being selective. The hard-hitting ‘Tonight with Trevor McDonald’ is a case in point, plus they did that ‘Brideshead Revisited’ thirty years ago.

But I do have a bit of a problem with them in that our local news broadcast that they put on at the end of the real bulletin is actually local news from Yorkshire and Lincolnshire.

For some reason, we cannot get the Norfolk news. And we cannot get digital because the church tower is in the way. This is the reality of the digital divide. There is only one thing more dull than the local news bulletin and that is somebody else’s local news bulletin.

They should watch out. Because, with the onward march of technology, I would imagine that in about a year’s time, this diary will actually be some form of web-based TV channel. Then people interested in Village events will get all the news they want, whenever they want it.

There will be adverts in it, of course, for organisations like the Village Shop and the Cheerful Builder. And it will probably not run all day, but I will buy in some cheap talk shows to run at other times.

There will be ‘Celebrity Karaoke’ from the pub next door. And ‘Molewatch’, with Bill Oddie. And live bowls (I could probably get Ron Atkinson on the cheap to commentate).

You might be sceptical but this is exactly how Sky started.

“That was rubbish,” said the LTLP. “That was absolute crap.”

I wasn’t so sure, and gave the spacious lady from Malta a seven out of ten on my score sheet. That might seem quite high to you, but I work on a system of low expectations, where a ten out of ten in this particular exercise would be equivalent to about a three in any normal music environment.

Big A opened another bottle of wine.

The Village Eurovision Party is one of the highlights of the year. Just as in days gone past us country folk might have done maypole dancing or killed a pig, now we have new traditional rituals to bring a sense of cohesion to the community. We caught up with local gossip and news as some people from Turkey yabba-yabbad from the screen.

“All over the beer garden!!!”

“So what did you do?”

“Well Short Tony started discreetly covering it with earth, but there was so much there. So we tried to get her home, but…”

The shared experience of fellowship brought us together as we groaned at the voting. Just as the foreigners did not let us win the European Cup because we invaded Iraq, so the greasy racists made a point of voting for other countries and not us, despite the fact that we had the song that should have won because we are British.

“There are some people,” I observed, “who are sad enough to sit at home and watch this tosh. Sad and lonely people with no taste. But a party is completely different, isn’t it?”

A forest of heads nodded around the room.

“More wine?”

We settled down to watch the end of the results.

Partying away, all four of us.

I took my seat.

The train out of King’s Cross was unusually busy. I adopted my usual foolproof strategy for ensuring that nobody sits next to me – I opened my broadsheet newspaper wide, placed a smelly-looking sandwich on the table in front of me and adopted the facial expression of a yob.

An American embarked. I knew he was an American because he had a big hat. He sat next to me.

I quite like American people. I know there are some anti-Americans who might have a go at them for their foreign policy, not doing the Kyoto thing etc., but if I meet an American person I do not expect them to take me personally to task for Ben Elton. And the jury’s still out as to which of these has the potential to cause more long-term misery and despair.

He introduced himself, as one does on trains. I politely did likewise before returning to my newspaper.

“Is there a washroom on the train?” he asked.

I put down my newspaper and struggled with this, before giving the honourable reply. “If you’ve just come from Heathrow,” I advised, “I would hate for the first impression of our country’s sanitation to be the toilets on WAGN.”

Once more I lifted my newspaper, this time in an extremely exaggerated ‘look, I am reading my newspaper’ type fashion.

He took this in good spirits and began asking me things. It was pointless to resist.

He was from Arizona, which made him a proper American, not like those plastic ones that you see on ‘Friends’ and stuff. I explained that I’d always wanted to visit Arizona when I was a kid, because it sounded quite exciting, what with having a ‘Z’ in it. (This was before I visited Ashby-de-la-Zouch).

“Are we still in London, or is that an English village?” he asked (word-for-word) as we sped through Knebworth.

“And what are those?”

I spent ten minutes giving an interesting historical lecture on the English allotment movement, from wartime to present day.

“And that? Wow, that is lush.”

I glowed with pride.

“It’s a bowling green.”

“A what?”

“A bowling green. Do you not play bowls in America? Like… lawn bowls? Where you have to get each bowling ball closest to the white ball?”

“Oh! Like the old folk play!” he laughed.

“Right,” I said, in a very small voice.

I wander out into the front garden to find the lawn pulverised by moles. A neat trail leads from under the fence – almost exactly where the sign was placed.I stand with mouth agape. The front garden is my pride and joy. (I have low standards). Now it looks like Nagasaki after a drunken visit from Frank Spencer during the 1987 hurricane.

Furiously, I stomp down the tunnels, then prowl around for several minutes brandishing the nearest thing that lies to hand – a Stuart Surridge 333 Turbo signed personally by Graham Gooch who, in an ironic twist, does look a bit like a mole when you come to think about it.

Mr and Mrs Short Tony emerge and point and laugh a bit.

A couple of commenters the other day mentioned Jasper Carrott. I don’t know much about the chap, but I guess he did some form of mole routine. Although as I understand it he comes from Birmingham, so unless moles have developed a penchant for burrowing through concrete in order to dig up the floors of high rise flats, I suspect he might have been making things up for comic effect.

That was unworthy. Forgive me Birmingham, I am cross and am not thinking straight.

This is deadly serious.

He will pay for this.