I ALWAYS think that all those poets who wrote about the burgeoning of spring or came over all romantic about waving daffodils and buds bursting forth have never owned a cat.
Because as far as I'm concerned spring not only heralds new life bursting forth but new life being killed stone dead by a feline on the prowl.
This thought came to me the other night as I sat in the garden admiring the new beech leaves on the hedge. They really are glorious; soft, downy and the most extraordinary shade of pale lime green.
Then, from the hedge, came an anguished shriek, and a cat sprang out of the hedge like a Jack in the Box, pouncing on yet another small furry creature which was about to meet its maker rather earlier than it had planned.
It didn't, because I caught hold of a very cross ginger animal and marched its struggling form back into the house and deposited it in a chair, making the nightly score of the battle of the hedge as Voles 1 - Cat 0. But I'm not there all the time and usually the voles are on the losing side in a big way.
Furthermore, you can't really adopt a 'what the eye doesn't see the heart doesn't grieve' attitude to all this slaughter because the eye does see. The eye sees small entrails left handily on the step for you to walk in, or a pair of lungs deposited neatly on a particularly light carpet. Or you come across a cat who has overdone his supper ration of hedgerow rodents vomiting up the excess on your bedspread.
Worse still, you know exactly who killed cock robin, because you have just spotted its head under your television.
One of the weekly jobs I enjoy is putting together the community pages - pages which prove that village life is alive and well. It's particularly nice to see that the jumble sale is still thriving, because with all the charity shops and car boot sales you might think it wasn't. But here in Cornwall jumble sales are still a power to be reckoned with.
I have a great fondness for the jumble sale because I spent a lot of time attending them as a child, mostly as the willing or unwilling companion of my grandmother who sought out jumble sales with a built in radar system.
I have written about her league table of favourite jumble sales before: A list headed by the Conservative Association in our particular part of Sussex which had nothing to do with political affiliations but everything to do with the quality of the goods. Conservative Ladies did not go in for tat and had jumble of a very superior sort. I dare say nothing has changed.
I've never really lost the training I received under the SAS of the jumble trail - who dares gets to the front of the queue - and still enjoy the elbowing and toe treading of a really good sale.
It was, however, only when I was asked to help at one myself that I saw the other side of the fence.
This began as a request to help a friend go round and collect jumble in our neighbourhood where I discovered that the people with the biggest houses are not necessarily the most generous when it comes to parting with their cast-offs. Quite the reverse, the amount of rubbish we were lumbered with was astonishing. One woman actually gave us a casserole dish with the remains of a burnt stew in it.
Once 'on board' it seemed to be assumed I would want to help with the jumble sale itself and accompanied by three children, who had been less than pleased to hear their Saturday afternoon outing was going to be to a church hall, I went.
My first shock was the size of the hall, which was only marginally smaller than Albert and full of old clothes and stacks of trestle tables.
We were to be organised by one of those ladies who seem to have been born with a tight perm and wearing a tight two piece floral outfit.
She bullied and bossed us for an hour until the tables were up, the goods piled on them. She had eyed my children with a certain amount of distaste but finally marshalled them behind the toy counter and told them to behave. Which to my surprise they did.
She then turned to me and ordered me to stand by the door and not to let any unsavoury characters in. It took me a moment to realise I had just been promoted to jumble sale bouncer.
Not that it mattered because when the doors opened every unsavoury character in the town rushed towards me like a herd of elephants and I had to move swiftly out of the way to avoid being trampled.
As head of jumble security I was given the task of policing the sale and told to watch out for shoplifters. Before I could ponder whether people who stole from jumble sales could legitimately be called shoplifters I spotted a woman shoving a hideous purple knit jumper suit down the front of her coat.
I hadn't the heart to challenge her. Firstly she was built like a shot putter and secondly any humiliation I could mete out was not going to be half as bad as having to wear the knit suit in public.
During the afternoon I was able to observe the antics of a large number of people who had no intention of paying for their goods. Perhaps they thought that stealing didn't count if the goods had been donated.
Their techniques varied from the blatant shoving stuff up or under their clothes (one woman was trying on coats and forgetting to take them off) to surreptitiously dropping them into carrier bags, or collecting armfuls of clothing and disappearing into the crowd to reappear a few moments later without them.
Only my children, and a few more who were helping out, were strictly observing the rules, yelling 'you haven't paid for that teddy' to grannies intent on getting another item up their already bulging skirts.
The genteel ladies serving behind the counters were no match for any of the customers, even those who were paying, and quickly stopped mentioning ridiculously high prices and gratefully accepted the ten pence pieces they were offered.
For nearly two hours the room resembled a rugby scrum crossed with the sort of nastiness you get with revolutions in small South American countries and it has to be said that the vast majority of the protagonists were female.
By the close of the afternoon many were nursing bruises on their shins and one of the helpers had been crushed by a trestle table which had been shoved up against the wall with her behind it by a possee of demented women.
The rest of us were all in a state of collapse as the last customer trailed out of the door.
Nobody mentioned the abject failure of my security role because by the end of the sale we apparently still had just as much jumble as we started with and I wished I had encouraged a few more shoplifters.
One of the helpers was crying because someone had sold her coat (or more likely I had watched it walk out of the door on someone wearing four others as well) and the caretaker suddenly appeared from whatever niche he had been hiding in.
He demanded to know what we were going to do with the leftovers and the boss lady drew herself and her bosom up and began what looked like becoming a very nasty row, especially as she started by calling him 'my man'.
The rest of us slunk away as quickly as we could, like thieves in the night.