Anyway, I returned from the Girt Clog Club to find that I'd got a mole making one hell of a mess of my garden.

I'd never come across them before. Born in Acocks Green you don't get a lot of moles around. If they found a mole in Acocks Green they'd eat it. It took me just a few days to realize this mole was driving me bonkers. I'd spend hours and hours mowing the lawn and getting the lines all straight. Then next morning you wake up and it's like looking at a sea of zits. There just doesn't seem to be any mole catchers left. So it's a DIY job with moles (Destroy It Yourself).

So I bought a mole trap: a big metal thing you have to bait with worms. A pretty revolting job, so I used spaghetti and hoped they wouldn't know the difference. But I put plenty of bait in the trap, set it and the mole came along, ate all the spaghetti and pushed the trap out of the way. It took me two months before I realized that there was no way he was going to go into it. He was just getting bigger on all the spaghetti he was eating.

Then I bought a firework, called Molesmoke, which is like a Roman candle. You light it, shove it down the hole and then cover the earth over. The instructions say: 'The smoke, which is heavier than air, lies in the run, is poisonous and kills the mole!'
No, it doesn't.
They love them. You can hear them giggling. And after a while you begin to get the mole twitch. You got a mole?

'Yeah,' you say, with a tick in your face. People come up with loopy ideas of how to get rid of them. 'There's only one way to get rid of a mole - you've got to shove garlic and mothballs down the holes. They don't like the smell.'
'Really?'
'Never fails.'
So I was there for two weeks shoveling the stuff down. They ate the lot! Just got enormous moles and bigger hills.

Then this other bloke says: 'There's only one way to get rid of a mole.'
'What?'
'You've got to buy those plastic windmills you get from Woolworths.
'They are like long sticks with a plastic bit at the end which whirls around. You get one of them,' he says, and you stick it down the middle of the mole run. When the wind sends the whirly bit round it vibrates the stick and the noise scares the mole away.' I fell for it. I've got two hundred of them in my lawn. The first big gust of wind blew my fence down, yet the moles, far from being frightened, ate all the ends of the sticks.

About five weeks ago I was in the local boozer having a drink when this guy comes in: "Ere,' he says. 'I ‘ear you got a mole.'
'Yes.'
'There's only one way to get rid of a mole.'
'Really...'
'Blow its bloody head off!'
"What with?'
'A twelve-bore.'
'What do you do? Stick it down the hole and…
'No, no,' he says, shaking his head. 'But it costs you a night's sleep, mind.'
'Anything. I'll sacrifice anything.'
'What you do is stay up all night, When it's all quiet Moley starts digging, pushing up the earth from your lawn. When he does that he's only half an inch from the top. Then you start blasting away.'
'Does it work?'
'Never fails!'
'But where do I get a twelve-bore from?'
'You can borrow mine for a fiver.'
Sure enough, he delivers the gun and a box of cartridges - enough to do a bank raid. I'm there on a Sunday night with this great big gun. I have strapped a torch to the barrel so I can see what I am doing.
And I sit on a swivel chair.
All the neighbors are watching from their bedroom windows.
'What's he doing?'
'I don't know. Imitating a lighthouse?'

So it's about half past three on a Sunday morning and so quiet you could hear a leaf drop. Suddenly I hear a scratching and five yards ahead there's a mole coming out of the lawn. I turn on the searchlight. Now, I know this sounds stupid, but I'd never thought to practice with the twelve-bore. I had never fired a gun that size in my life. So ... BOOM! And I flew ten yards off my stool. The only thing I hit were all the apples in my tree. I was incensed and started shooting everywhere. B 0 0 M! B 0 0 M! B 0 0 M!! Shooting like a maniac. The garden was like the Somme.

Then I noticed this blue flashing light. There were a couple of coppers standing there:
'What are you doing Carrott?'
'Mole-catching.'

They wander over. Luckily, one of them had suffered the ravages of a mole so was sympathetic. He muttered: 'Carry on. But be quiet.' They're still there, of course, digging up the garden.

'What's on tonight?' 'Beetroot.' 'Oh, not so good as mothballs and garlic.' 'No. And we could do with some more fireworks to see what we're doing.' 'I wonder if we'll get any more wind-sticks again.’ Hope so. They're delicious.' 'Bloody noisy up there last night, wasn't it?

Reprinted with the kind permission of Mr. Jasper Carrott.