ONE swallow does not a summer make, but a dead mouse on the carpet definitely heralds the onset of Spring.

Around the time the clocks go forward, the little mouskies climb out of their nests, stretch and yawn in the cool morning air, and succumb to the slavering jaws of kitty death.

We have two cats, Kali and Shiva. They are getting on now, "Fifteen next birthday!" in the parlance of human oldies. And, it has to be said, they're slowing down a bit.

Time was, Kali would have had a row of mice laid out in the kitchen come early March, their glassy eyes imprinted with the last thing they ever saw, the glinting claws of a diluted tortoiseshell about to neatly eviscerate them.

Kali was always the top mouser in the house. Her brother Shiva, a cat of sometimes very little brain but enormous heart, never seemed quite to keep up. He instead cultivated a reputation of the scourge of non-mousey things in and around the garden, specifically moths and the occasional small frog. Grrrrr.

I was beginning to wonder whether we'd see a mouse offering at all this year, especially after Kali tried to make a leap from one sofa to the other over a small table - a stunt she has performed to perfection countless times - and instead knocked over a full glass off wine, disposing of one of her nine lives in the process.

Shiva isn't much better, struggling to climb on to the windowsill from where he likes to keep watch for young cats strutting on his patch so he can meow at them and tell them to go and play outside their own houses.

And, let's face it, dead mice are hardly the prettiest things. Especially when their guts are squeezing between your toes thanks to the careful placing of a proud midnight kill right by the bed.

Live mice are even less of a welcome present, as anyone who's tried to coax one out from under a sofa for three hours will testify. I once lost one the cats brought in and didn't find it for months - and when I did it was flat and mummified, wedged between a paperback of Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's and a signed copy of Dynamo's autobiography.

So I wasn't missing the onset of mouse chase season, though when I did discover a little dead feller in the living room this week. I wasn't too disappointed. It seems the cats still have at least one more mousing season, and hopefully many more.

That said, the mouskies should have every chance they can get. So when I prised open the small, dilapidated shed where I keep the tools I never use this week, I saw a fluttering movement and one big, dark eye, looking at me from the shadows. We connected silently, and I gave the mouse a wink and told it to get back behind the empty Polyfilla tubes I hadn't realised I seem to be collecting.

I won't tell the cats if you don't.