Dawn chorus

"She won't move!"

It's 7.00 am and Deborah is sitting on the floor in the middle of the kitchen, making loud mewing noises, while Leo rapidly loses his temper nearby.

"Deborah, if you want to make sounds like that, go and make them in the sitting room."

She disappears. Within seconds, the mewing starts again, only louder.

"I said 'Go into the sitting room,' " I say, as Leo shows every sign of leaving his brief simmering phase and going instead for rapid boil mode, like those extremely fast kettles that are being advertised, though with the additional features of being much redder in the face and also capable of sudden, explosive violence.

"I am in the sitting room," says Deborah.

"She's in the doorway, which is why it's just as loud," says Leo, slowly, deliberately and with considerable force.

The cat, who has always had a nice sense of timing, chooses this minute to make an appearance from the garden and treat us to a new game of her own devising, called 'Keepy Uppy with a mouse." The mouse has every appearance of enjoying the game less than the cat, though the screams from Deborah as Leo finally runs out of patience may also be contributing to its general air of malaise and world-weariness.

We catch the mouse in a shoe. It runs up the shoe and falls out from a considerable height, attempts to stand up and falls onto its side. The cat, obviously brimful with new ideas for fun things to do with a small rodent, reappears before we can stop her, and bats it in an exploratory way with a sheathed paw. We recapture the mouse and release it outside. It huddles under a wall, looking vulnerable.

"We should put it out of its misery," I say, as I always do.

"Well, I'm not doing it," say Leo and Deborah, jolted out of their argument by the excitement of seeing something that's so obviously a much bigger victim than they are, despite being so much smaller.

All this, and there's still breakfast, school snacks, school uniform and my own departure to organise.

By the time I get to my first lesson, I feel as if I've already completed a full week's work.

"What do you say to your music teacher?" asks the class assistant, as the children line up at the end. I can only hope they see fit to recommend a large G&T followed by the rest of the day in bed.