May I, ladies and gentlemen, present myself to you highly-placed eminences. I am the humble creature of the earth that was the subject of such infamy in this country and its corridors of power over the last few days. Dishonoured in a book, dragged to Parliament, subject to reportorial and editorial scrutiny, as well as to loose bazaar gossip, I have been going through traumatic times indeed. For a shy, retiring, introverted creature from the Tapidae family like myself—a solitary philosopher if I could put it that way except perhaps when, like all living creatures, the blood rushes to the head during the mating season—all this is far more than I can bear.

Human beings don’t know very much about us and I cannot but agree with renowned zoologists when they observe that moles are probably among the least understood mammals on the face of the earth. I am really a peaceable creature, happy to subsist on a diet of worms, insects, the occasional mollusc and other worthless creatures that the earth is rich in, if you dig a little deep. Naturally house-proud, I spend my days tending to the tunnels that I have created with my own snout (my personal record, by the way, is clearing 18 feet of earth per hour, I can exert a lateral excavating force equivalent to some 30 times my body weight). Kenneth Grahame, the world-famous author, celebrated a bloke like me as the hero of his Wind in the Willows. I just love the opening line of that classic: ‘‘The Mole had been working hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home.’’

... contd.