Once all my critters have been fed and watered I make myself breakfast. Now, at this point I should say that I sit down to a repast of freshly squeezed orange juice, accompanied by just-baked breakfast rolls straight from the Aga, homemade preserves and a newly laid egg courtesy of one of my hens.

Of course I do no such thing.

I can’t stand eggs – there isn’t enough cash in the banks to get me to eat a soft-boiled one, yuck! – and I haven’t got the time to squeeze oranges and bake bread, so usually my country breakfast is a mug of tea and three Weetabix, which I eat in a hurry before they turn mushy in the milk.

I don’t know what I’d do without Weetabix. When I go filming in the wilds of Africa or Borneo I always take a box with me just in case I can’t get hold of any and the food on offer isn’t to my taste.

There’s a smell in the kitchen that is becoming unbearable. I recognize it from old and it signals that from somewhere underneath the floorboards a dead rat is slowly turning to jelly as it decomposes. I love all animals except for rats and mice. Sorry but I just can’t stand them. I would rather be in a room with a couple of tigers than either a rat or a mouse.

There’s a few rats that have taken up residence in the loft. I can hear them charging around and running the length of the house as I lie in bed at night. It sounds as if a gang of hefty lads in hobnail boots are having a kick-around with a concrete football. But I resign myself to the fact that this is all part and parcel of living in a rural area and make a note to ring the rat-catcher first thing.

When I was a teenager one of my many jobs was working behind the bar of Yates’s Wine Lodge in Moorfields, Liverpool. The rat-catcher who came on a regular basis to dispose of the vermin that liked to sup on the ‘Aussie White’ down in the cellar was straight out of Dickens. He was a big man with a club foot and a crunched-up face like Popeye’s who would tell me horror stories about the size of the rats he’d caught in and around the city. ‘Bigger than a cat, sum of ’em,’ he’d exclaim proudly, fixing me with his watery eye. ‘And vicious with it.’ Consequently I avoided the cellar at all costs. If a barrel needed changing then I always made sure I was busy doing something very important hoping one of the other barmen would deal with it.

There was nothing Dickensian about the pest control expert who turned up to solve my problem. He arrived in his van and after inspecting the house both inside and out as well as the surrounding outbuildings he discovered how the big buggers were getting into the house: it appeared mine had used the honeysuckle growing up the side to climb up and gained access via a missing tile in the roof.

‘They can get in through the smallest space,’ he explained as he examined the rat droppings in the loft, ‘and I’m afraid to tell you that you have a serious infestation.’

That honeysuckle came down faster than Joan Crawford with an axe in a rose garden, and while humane traps were laid in the loft, traps containing poison were set in the outhouses. As this poison is Warfarin-based I had the pleasure of witnessing numerous large rats in their final death throes haemorrhaging blood from both ends and vowed there and then to never use such extreme measures to rid myself of vermin ever again.

A lot has happened over the years that I’ve lived in this house, both bad and good. There’s been quite a few memorable parties and get-togethers, but apart from the social side I’ve also learned a lot – for instance I can now identify wild flowers and herbs whereas once upon a time a plant was just a plant. I’m more aware of the seasons than I ever was living in the city, and I’ve even surprised myself by making chutney, jams, butter and ice cream.

I used to worry that I was going to seed, churning out gallons of ice cream instead of ‘clubbing it’. But once I discovered that I actually no longer want to go out every night, I came to terms with the fact that secretly I was beginning to prefer staying in and indulging myself by trying out new skills, wondering if the strawberry jam I was making would ever reach a rolling boil, or worrying if the orphaned lamb with bloat that I was sitting up with all night would see the sunrise.

Instead of attempting to get this new country lifestyle to adapt to my old one I went with the flow. It took a while but slowly I learned to relax and seriously embrace the joys of living in the countryside in all its diversity.

‘Nothing ever happens in the countryside,’ I’ve heard city dwellers say. ‘It’s just fields and sheep.’ They couldn’t be more wrong, but to discover what it’s really like to live in the depths of the countryside you have to get stuck in, get involved and embrace all the wonders rural life has to offer.

I firmly believe that we have our own microclimate down here in my part of the world for if it’s snowing in Liverpool then it’ll be a sunny day down here and vice versa.

As I said, the weather’s been lousy lately, grey skies and non-stop rain for weeks, but suddenly the weather turned overnight from grim to beyond glorious and changing me in the process from what my mother would call ‘Misery on Poverty’s back’ into someone that a person who didn’t know me might describe as having a ‘sunny disposition’.

I’m sickeningly cheerful and happily indolent and apart from doing a bit of washing I spend the day lying pegged out in the sun. ‘Like a lizard on a rock’ as Murphy was wont to remark.

‘Killer temperatures!’ the front cover of a tabloid screams at me in the post office, and I couldn’t be happier at the news.

It’s so hot I sleep with all my bedroom windows open and the curtains pulled back – unusual behaviour for a nocturnal animal like me who normally prefers to sleep in the pitch dark and doesn’t like to be woken at the crack of dawn by a face full of sunbeams.

As the windows are flung open to the elements a couple of bats, part of one of the many colonies that inhabit the roof, boiler room and the neighbouring woods, decide to pop in to see how we’re all doing.

Naturally this sends the dogs berserk, Bullseye in particular, who leaps up and down, perfectly erect and poised, snapping at the air with his powerful jaws and putting me in mind of that crocodile perpetually trying to get a bite out of Captain Hook.

The commotion rouses me out of my doze with a start and in my confused state I start shouting to no one in particular.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ I roar dramatically. ‘I can’t be woken up like this, I’m a very delicate mechanism – one tilt of the mantelpiece and this clock stops!’ Which I thought quite a good analogy considering the hour and the circumstances.

This blinding piece of off-the-cuff dialogue was wasted on Olga who was sat on the bed intent on getting hold of whatever was hanging from the curtain. Olga, I hasten to remind you, is a cairn terrier and not a mysterious Russian lady spy (in case you were wondering).

A tiny bat crawls slowly up the curtain while the other one flies out of the bedroom door and vanishes down the landing.

I remove the little bat from the curtain before he/she crawls up into the folds of the pelmet and after releasing it out of the window I go in search of its companion who by now has disappeared quicker than Farage following the announcement that we were out of Europe. After a quick scout around there’s no sign of the bat so I give up and go back to bed.

No doubt he’ll turn up in the back bedroom hanging from the mantelpiece and demanding tea, toast and bluebottle jam in the morning.

There has been the ominous rumble of distant thunder since the early part of the evening and thankfully the hot night air, disgustingly heavy and oppressively still, has now stirred itself from its slumber and from my bed I can see that a light breeze is disturbing some papers on the desk under the window.

Unable to get back to sleep now I turn the radio on, hoping to catch the Shipping Forecast, but as I’ve missed it I tune into another station that turns out to be called France Bleu. Nevertheless they’re playing Dvořák’s ‘Song to the Moon’ which is apt as tonight the moon is full and in the clear night sky she is looking particularly beautiful.

I lie there dozing, feeling myself being lulled by Renée Fleming’s beautiful voice when suddenly and without warning a clap of thunder as deafening as the boom of a cannon cracks overhead followed quickly by a sheet of forked lightning so violent it lights up the fields and the garden allowing me to see them clearly from my bed for a full three seconds.

The breeze turns somewhat livelier and a gas bill and a letter on the desk from a woman who wants me to do something about the bile bears of China fly across the room in the sudden heavy gust of wind.

From a mild electrical storm the heavens suddenly pull all the stops out and produce the full orchestra. The house shakes underneath it and I rush around closing windows to keep the driving rain out.

Strangely the dogs don’t bark but I can see that they are spooked by the maelstrom – as indeed, if I care to admit it, am I. I’ve been in some pretty violent tropical storms in the Far East in the past but they were nothing compared to this beauty that’s raging now.

I remember how my mother would open both the front and back doors and take the phone off the hook ‘to let the fireball escape’ whenever there was a bit of thunder and lightning, but I don’t know what she would’ve done if she’d found herself in the middle of this one.

‘The gods are annoyed tonight,’ I say to Eddie, my Jack Russell cross, and instantly regret it as the tale of Bert Savoy comes to mind.

Bert Savoy was a popular female impersonator on the American vaudeville stage in the early 1900s. He portrayed a sassy, brassy trollop who sailed extremely close to the wind with his outrageous double entendres – it’s Bert who is credited with moulding the young Mae West into the slinky, wisecracking vamp (exactly like Bert’s stage character) that she eventually became.

At the peak of his career Bert was out walking one day after a matinee with some friends on the beach at Long Island when an electrical storm started to whip up.

‘Hmm, I see Miss God is throwing a hissy fit,’ Bert was reported to have said, and in the next instant he was struck by lightning and killed.

I put all thoughts of poor Bert out of my mind and shove a shivering Eddie under the duvet to calm him as I wait for the power to go, which it inevitably does when we have even the mildest of storms. As I dwell on this possibility the bedside light and the radio predictably turn off.

The raging storm is sufficiently out of control now and if you saw it in a horror film you’d say it was laughably over the top. Eddie, normally as hard as nails, has turned into a complete wuss and I can feel him shaking against my leg underneath the duvet.

Even Olga, who is usually unfazed by such excessive displays of nature’s antics, moves up the bed and gets close to me before changing her mind in case I think she’s gone soft, independent beast that she is, and jumping off to hide underneath it.

Plonking Eddie safely in the crossed paws of Bullseye, looking hangdog and pathetic on his cushion, I go downstairs in search of the torch, which should live under the sink but is never there. The lightning really is impressive and I open the back door to get a better look, standing on the step and watching the rain, which is coming down in sheets.

Seized by a fit of madness, I take myself off into the garden and stand in my sleeping attire (an old T-shirt and a pair of ancient pyjama bottoms) underneath the raging sky half expecting to hear a voice shouting from somewhere ‘Get in you soft sod!’

I’m awestruck at the sheer power and magnificence of this unpredictable beast that has been unleashed in the heavens, and standing there in the garden battered by the wind and rain I really am aware of just how extremely unimportant I am in the wider scheme of things. I also feel defiant in the face of the storm, aware that like Bert Savoy a rogue fork of lightning just might pick me as a target. I can’t resist a chorus of ‘I’m a Lonesome Little Raindrop’ and am grateful that nobody from Social Services is looking over the fence.

As soon as it had arrived the storm clears, leaving only a few minor grumbles and the occasional spiteful flash of lightning in its wake. The rain has dwindled into a light drizzle and the moon, released from her temporary imprisonment from behind the dark clouds, reappears as they gradually part, brushing herself down then, being the celestial pro that she is, smiling as brightly as Joan Collins at a premiere as if nothing had happened.

It’s cool now and the air, perfumed by honeysuckle and nicotiana, smells clean and fresh. Before I return to the house I look in on the animals. The pigs are snoring contentedly in their shed – no battle of the gods is going to disturb them – and the goats, who have plenty of shelter and are more sensitive than their porcine neighbours to the weather, are prancing around their paddock as if their football team has just won the Premiership.

The chickens are sensible birds and not being fond of the rain are tucked away in their hen house while Minerva, my barn owl, sitting on the roof of the hen house, stares at me inquisitively through large unblinking eyes as if wondering what on earth I’m up to in the garden in the early hours of the morning soaked to the skin.

I return to the house totally exhilarated by this unusual nocturnal excursion and not in the least bit bothered that I’m wet through as it feels like I’ve just taken a peculiarly cleansing shower.

The electricity has returned, and as I climb the stairs I can hear the announcer on the radio proudly congratulating the royal couple, known as Kate and Wills by the tabloids, on the birth of their first child.

Had this’ve been medieval times then the future king of England’s birth falling on the hottest day of the year when the moon was full and the wrath of the tempest shook the earth, it would either have been considered an omen of good fortune or a prophetic warning that dark times were just around the corner …

Drying myself off, I imagine how they’ll talk about the storm tomorrow in the supermarket.

‘Did you hear that storm last night?’ they’ll ask each other excitedly, blocking up the aisle with their trollies as they stand and swap horror stories about how it affected them, each one trying to outdo the other with exaggerated tales of devastation and destruction.

I open the window again before I get into bed. The dogs have forgotten their fears and are asleep now, Louis snoring louder than a ward full of men with bronchial conditions. It’s quiet outside again – the calm following the storm – and in no time at all I too fall into a deep sleep.

The air is cooler the morning following the storm but the sun continues to shine.

‘At last,’ I think as I watch a healthy mass of bees who have come out of hiding and are gorging on the heads of the lavender that is prolific around the garden, a glorious purple and as fragrant as an old lady’s knicker drawer.

(I mean that in a good way you understand as my ma and all her cronies had little homemade twists of muslin containing lavender in their knicker drawers. Not that I make a habit of rooting around and sniffing old ladies’ knicker drawers I can assure you of that.)

I’ve noticed the steady demise of the bee population since I’ve been here so it’s good to see so many back again. I’ve become a bit obsessive about the absence of bees and find it very worrying that without them we’ll probably starve. Bees are nature’s fertilizers and yet nothing is done about the fact we have a major disaster on our hands. Pesticides that cause colony collapse disorder as well as a vampyric mite are all hastening the death knell for the bee.

Pity the same can’t be said about the wasp which together with the mosquito have got to be the most irritating bugs ever invented.

What was Mother Nature thinking the day she gave life to these bloody things? Did she possibly have PMT? Did she suddenly snap one day and announce she was sick of making butterflies, robins, fluffy bunnies and puppies and out of sheer spite created a creature to match her mood and named it accordingly?

The Wasp.

All right, I know they have their uses as part of the food chain, but they ruin picnics, eat all my fruit on the trees in the orchard and then have the barefaced cheek to sting you. I hate them.

I was given the most wonderful instrument of execution called ‘The Executioner Pro’. It looks like a tennis racket but with a push of the button on the handle the bluebottle you’ve just hit is given a killer zap of electricity resulting in instant death. Wasps take a little longer and a few more zaps than your average fly, and like a redneck radio DJ in the Deep South on the morning a prisoner on death row is going to the chair I hear myself saying as I go for the wasp hanging around the fruit bowl, ‘You’re gonna fry boy, you’re gonna FRY!’

Of course there are other ways of dealing with our enemy The Wasp without turning into a psychopath. I’ve discovered that hanging brown paper bags in the fruit trees manages to keep the majority of them off the Victoria plums and apples as supposedly it makes them believe that a colony has already set up home there.

Wasps are attracted to bright colours, so if you are going on a picnic or intend to eat lunch in the garden then I’d advise against summery pastels and dig out your funeral coat instead. Funnily enough they dislike red – maybe they’re Tories, I wouldn’t be surprised.

Here’s a tip.

If you are unfortunate enough to be stung by a wasp, or a bee, then rub the affected area with a raw onion. Honestly, try it, as you’ll be amazed. I was stung by a wasp that had crept into my mug of tea in the garden and while taking a swig it bit me on my lower lip. Not wishing to look like I’d been up to Harley Street to have the gob pumped up with silicone I remembered my ma’s words, ran into the house and rubbed the affected area with a chunk of raw onion for a good twenty minutes. The result was no pain or swelling and I remained as thin-lipped as ever. It was as if I hadn’t been stung at all, even if I did stink a bit, which meant I couldn’t kiss anyone, but as nobody wanted me to it didn’t really matter. Garlic is just as effective only I didn’t have any of that close to hand so I’ll have to wait until the next time I get stung before I can test that one out.

Be warned, if you do kill a wasp by stunning it with a copy of your newspaper of choice and then crushing it satisfactorily with your heel as it lies on the floor you’ll probably notice a sudden influx of the things. A dying wasp releases a pheromone that attracts others to the scene of the crime. All of a sudden there’s hundreds of the little swines gathered for what I can only imagine is a sort of wasp wake, demanding sherry and whisky and a nice piece of that fruitcake please, and possibly a boiled ham and mustard sandwich.

I’ve planted lots of flowers in the garden that bees and butterflies love such as honeysuckle, buddleia and of course tons of lavender. Pick lavender first thing in the morning as the heat of the day causes the flowers to retain their oils – or so my ma advised, and as she was usually right about all things flora that’s what I do, mixing the dried heads with some wormwood and rosemary and then tying them up in a bag cut from a yard of butter muslin just like the ones I was on about that old girls have in their knicker drawers.

I ignore the fact that this might be considered old ladyish behaviour because when they’re hung in my wardrobe my clothes, sweaters in particular, survive uneaten. Moths loathe the smell and, like the rats before them, they do the decent thing and change lodgings.

I was given a sweater as a Christmas present once that obviously cost a ridiculous amount of money. It was woven from the softest cashmere with a jet black sheen that the designer claimed ‘reeked of elegant simplicity’ and I thought it was the business. Hanging it up in the wardrobe on one of those padded coat hangers nicked from a hotel I gave it one final loving stroke before closing the door on it for the night.

In the morning I took it out of the wardrobe and, carefully pulling it on over my head before looking in the mirror to see if I reeked of elegant simplicity, my jaw hit the floor. My beautiful sweater that cost the same price as a terraced house in run-down areas of the north of England had been turned into what resembled lace overnight. A family of moths with very expensive tastes had obviously had a midnight feast, gorging themselves on my pride and joy. There were more holes in my sweater than a golf course.

That’s why I couldn’t give a monkey’s what anyone thinks when I make moth-deterrent bags to hang amongst my clothes although unlike the ones you find in village fetes I don’t embroider mine, nor do I tie them up with coloured ribbon; I keep it butch and tie them up with brown twine instead. I suppose highfalutin shops would call them shabby chic. Anyway, now everyone wants one as they’ve proved to be so effective and, as Valerie Singleton was often heard to say, ‘Later on I’ll be showing you how to make your very own.’

The garden, revived by its long drink last night, is blooming.

The bushes in my allotment are laden with gooseberries, raspberries and an abundance of black and redcurrants. I’ve got strawberries coming out of my ears and even the tiny fraises des bois