WHAT DOES THE DOCTOR THINK THIS MONTH?

Dr Ian has his annual rant at local moles and offers some humour to ease his pain

Of nature, a deaf mole (and a cat)

I have many problems with nature in my garden. Nature can be very aggressive and comes in the form of Bindweed, Bluebells, Ground Elder and predatory animals. Farmers have similar problems, the weather being the main one, and I am grateful that my income is not affected by the vicissitudes of nature. Management tells me that I am a control freak - totally wrong, of course - but I admit that I do like to control my environment and would be seriously upset to be a farmer with no control over the weather!

Anyway, to the subject of moles. For some years, I have been "controlling" the mole population in our lawn with a battery of ultrasonic mole repellers, strategically placed around the garden. Small windmills don't work if there is no wind and I am not keen on trapping them. One morning, I awoke to see one of my mole repellers lying on the grass, with an assortment of molehills in the vicinity. The mole had ejected my sonic repeller with the waste soil from his tunnel. Somewhat miffed, I inserted half a dozen repellers into the ground quite near to the affected area, all buzzing furiously. What did the mole do? He went around in circles putting up molehills, some even around the base of the repellers! Obviously, he is stone deaf and impermeable to the noise which was supposed to deter him. Janet Stocking of Stoke Ferry tried mothballs - the lawn ended up looking as though it had been snowing and the moles chomped on totally unconcerned. She tells me that her husband, John, used to have a phobia of birds and feathers and also disliked moles. If you look at his grave, you will see that it is the only grave surrounded by molehills and there is a rook which attacks the gravestone remorselessly. Nature can be fierce!

One of our sons had a problem with next door's cat who had chosen one of his lavender bushes to use as a WC, killing the bush. I loaned him a new sonic cat repeller, guaranteed to deter cats over an area the size of his garden. The first day, the cat rocked up and peed against the machine and, the following day, his behaviour was even worse, right next to the machine!

I suppose there are two possibilities here; the first is that these sonic repellers do not work and the second is that the mole and the cat were both deaf. What do you think?

From the Probus Magazine, courtesy of Peter Cooper - A genie pops out of a bottle, offers a gift and the man who released him asked for a bridge across the English Channel. The genie told him this would be impossible, ecologically unfriendly and, altogether, a thoroughly bad idea. The man considered and then asked for the gift to understand his wife and her thoughts, and for the ability to keep her happy all the time. "Mmm" said the genie "How many lanes would you like on the Channel bridge?"

There is a fish restaurant where all the food is cooked to order. The waiter told the customer that he could have crab in 15 minutes, lobster in 45 minutes or octopus in six hours. "Six hours?!" exclaimed the customer. "Yes, sir - I am sorry but the octopus keeps turning off the gas" replied the waiter.

These articles are intended to be light hearted and to give no offence to anyone. So, there were two Welshmen, Paddy and Mick, looking up at a flagpole. A blonde walked by and asked them what they were doing. They explained that they had to work out the height of the flagpole but had not yet worked out how to do so. She took a spanner out of her back pocket, undid two nuts, laid the flagpole down horizontally and measured the length. She then put the pole back up, tightened the nuts and said "There you are - 18ft 6inches long". Paddy looked unimpressed and, as the blonde walked away, he said to Mick "Typical - you ask a blonde for the height and she gives you the ****** length!"

Two Scots, paddy and Mick, were watching scuba divers enter the water backwards from their boat. "Why do they always fall off the boat backwards?" wondered Mick. "Well" said Paddy "if they fell forwards they'd still be in the ******** boat

A London criminal fell foul of the Glagow mafia - they made him an offer he couldn't understand.

A Glasgow man, drunk and penniless, spots a guy working on his car engine. "What's up, Jimmie?"

"Piston broke" came the reply. "Ah, same as masel.."

Finally, one from Peter Manning. A vicar was visiting an old lady and noticed a fish bowl on the harmonium, half full of water with a condom floating in it. Apparently, she had found the small packet in the park. The instructions were to place it on the organ and keep it wet, thus preventing the spread of disease. "Do you know" she said "I haven't had a cold or 'flu all winter".

Best wishes to you all

Ian G. Nisbet