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Dear Readers,

IT MAY appear as if I am reenacting a scene from Hitchcock’s Rear Window, playing a housebound Jimmy Stewart in dressing gown and slippers keeping watch over my neighbour’s homes from my attic bedroom with a pair of binoculars.

In fact I am stealthily tracking a garden intruder like an elite military sniper.Twice now I have spotted a rat nibbling seeds that have dropped from the bird feeders.

A rat! Can you believe it? Well, yes probably, given that we are never more than six feet away from one apparently. But I have never seen a rat on my turf before and I don’t like it one little bit.

Earlier today I was complaining to a friend about my new nemesis and casually looked out of the window and saw it again. Furious, I stormed downstairs shouting obscenities and grabbed a broom to chase it away – unintentionally recreating another classic thriller.This time Jack Nicholson’s deranged caretaker in Kubrick’s The Shining.

After successfully seeing the pest off, I strode back into the house, triumphant, only to discover that I had stepped in fox poo during the ambush.

Conservationists may be delighted about the return of the wild in the wake of coronavirus but I’m afraid I’m gonna have to side with the Nimbys on this one.

On Thursday NHS fundraising hero Captain, now Colonel,Tom turned 100 and a

talented Plymouth-based baker decided to commemorate the occasion by making a cake for him (see right).

Samantha Duckett, 29, who lives with husband Daniel, daughter SophiaMai, five, and twin boys, Morgan and Dewi, two, tells me: “I baked the cake and decorated it with the help of my lovely friend Shirley Fisher who made the walker. It is a jam sponge with butterscotch cream.”

Unable to deliver it to the great man himself due to lockdown restrictions, she decided to raffle off the cake selling £2 tickets and raised £120. She writes: “A cheque will be written for Captain Tom, along with a picture of the cake and a letter from us. Was a shame it couldn’t get to him as my daughter wanted him to have it. But I would still love him to see it.” Samantha took up baking about seven years ago and started making novelty cakes in the past three years.And now her passion has become a career.

“I have a little home business on Facebook called Sam’s Cakes and Crafts Boutique,” she says. “It’s fairly new but I thoroughly enjoyed baking and decorating this cake.”

Watch out Mary Berry, someone’s after your crown.