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I don’t necessarily disagree with the legal interpretation of copyright law here. Facebook is a US-based commercial company and, as far as I’m aware, if Facebook takes any interest in editorial control of its content (I recall it once censored a group of breast-feeding mothers on grounds of decency) then it loses the designation ‘safe harbour’ and becomes a target for law suits from those who think their copyright has been infringed. Thus, it should police its content proactively.

However, I added the Raider March to my video with a clear conscience. I had bought the music (not for the first time). I knew that viewers of the video would not mistake the music for something I’d composed myself. I did not think that its use would in any way diminish the earnings of the movie studio that owns the Raiders brand. And I did not consider that uploading the video to Facebook constituted a form of publication because the audience comprises a small audience of friends, any one of whom I might lend a book, DVD or CD. (I was specific about this by indicating ‘my friends only’.)

As I say, I don’t necessarily disagree with Facebook’s legal stance here. I signed up for their service and (ahem) read the licence agreement. But it’s another reminder that Facebook – while creating the illusion of a social experience – has a measure of control over the way I interact with my friends that doesn’t really correspond with the complete sovereignty I exercise in ‘meat space’.

That’s really a very funny coincidence. I checked in just now due to acute boredom at work. And would you believe it? Our house mouse turned up just on Friday. I got a single-line e-mail message from Anna, the text of which was that we have a mouse; and the sub-text of which was that I was in trouble.

There have been a couple of sightings – he’s a daring little bugger, coming out in daylight, and Anna even admires him grudgingly. She’s named him Marcus. I was sitting at my workstation yesterday when I realised he was dead at my line of sight – on top of a framed picture of Anna’s family, on top of Anna’s dresser.

I fed him some chocolate. I texted Anna: ‘Marcus is a cutie pie!’.

Anna was not thrilled by either of these actions on my part.

I too picked up a ‘live capture’ mouse trap at Home Base. It recommended peanut butter as bait, which we didn’t have, so Anna tried jelly. (Seemed intuitive enough.) However, when we got up this morning, either Marcus outsmarted us (I’d briefly imagined him removing the whole back cap where the food goes) – or he doesn’t like jelly.

I already know he likes chocolate; but I’ll certainly bear Muesli in mind if he continues to elude us.

I intend to release him in the churchyard round the corner. While I’m not sure he has just the right temperment for it, perhaps he will liven things up there – as a churchmouse.

Now, off to forward this to Anna, ostensibly to show her it’s not just us, but I already know she’ll merely take it as me defending A) the non-lethal trap and B) the existence of Marcus in general . . .

So my girlfriend and I are watching Last Chance to See when she spots something moving across the room. It’s a mouse. Not a gerbil; Erich, Dotty, Elvis and Snoopy are tucked up safely in their hutches. This is a wild, rough-looking, street-wise mouse. A mouse what is keeping it real, if you will; who is ‘down with it’; who eats wet liberals like us for breakfast.

The moment my girlfriend and I stand up, the mouse runs away behind the bookshelf. It spots the power cable leading to the light at the top of the shelf and shimmies up to avoid our fingers, which can’t quite get to him through the books.

At the top, he stops near the light and looks down at us.

He is about as long as my thumb. His fur is a rather – ahem – mousey and he has tiny, semi-transparent ears. His belly is grey and he is hanging onto the power cable with one fore-paw and both hind-paws.

He is brilliantly swashbuckling. I half expect him to laugh heartily and swing away.

‘He’s lovely!’ I say.

Britta gives me a sharp look. ‘He’s not lovely. He’s a bloody wild mouse.’

‘Perhaps we can tame him.’

‘What? He’ll chew the power cables!’

Britta knows how to motivate me: threaten my Apple products.

We set about trying to capture him. Imagine the Keystone Cops if there were only two of them and there was no chase music and no real story.

‘This isn’t working,’ Britta says after a minute or two. ‘Shake the cable. Let’s see if we can get him to fall into the fish tank.’

‘Hmm. It’s quite far to fall…’

Britta looks at me as though I’m an idiot.

‘Right,’ I say, lowering my voice.

At this point, the mouse is a ninja-like shadow on the mesh at the back of the gerbil hutch.

I must record that the gerbils – Elvis and Snoopy – have been called upon by their human overlords to help (somehow), and they have responded to this call in their own, gerbil-like way: They’ve sniffed each others’ genitals briefly, walked in and out of their food bowl, and gone to sleep completely ignorant of the fundamentals of the situation.

I hook the cable and give it a tug. Then, warming to my theme, I pull it all the way over to the side of the shelf, presumably taking the mouse with it. I look at Britta in triumph. She returns a look of indifference; I press on. I give the cable a shake. If the mouse is still holding on, he’ll be getting jostled.

Suddenly, the air is filled with the cutest distress call I’ve ever heard. The pathos is all too much for me. The mouse – once swashbuckling – is now wailing with hopelessness. This is like Bambi’s mother getting shot.

‘Sorry, mate!’

I let go and the mouse rappels to obscurity.

Today

It is 7:30 a.m. We’re both in bed. We’re woken by the sound of a mouse scrabbling. This is not unusual. Over the past couple of weeks, the mouse – whom we’ve christened ‘Tarzan’ – is heard to stroll through the wall spaces, through the attic, across floors at night, and generally treats the house like he owns it. So far, he has not eaten any food from the kitchen – though the dried wheat kernels in the microwaveable hot compress Britta keeps in the wardrobe are looking somewhat depleted.

I open my eyes.

Scrabble. Scrabble.

I smile.

This sound is a special, new one. It sounds rather like a swashbuckling paw on metal. It sounds – dare we hope – that the little bugger has wandered into the trap we set for him.

Peanut butter: didn’t like it. Too greasy, perhaps. Chocolate? Too much effort to chew. Muesli? Mmm. Just right.

The goldilocks solution.

Britta and I jump out of bed like it’s Christmas.

On the way to the woods at the back of our estate, we wonder what life will hold for the little chap. He will have gone from the luxury of the hot water cupboard to the somewhat trying circumstances of predation, rain, and a conker diet.

We choose not to release him in a field because he might be invited for breakfast before he’s got his bearings.

We find a hedge.

The trap comprises two metal boxes: the smaller slides inside the larger. For some reason, I decide to open the trap about six inches off the ground.

I give the halves a shake.

‘Hello?’ I say. ‘Still in there?’

‘Don’t tell me he’s escaped.’

‘Hmm, might have.’

Britta groans. ‘He’s probably still at home, backstroking through a bowl of Crunchy Nut.’

Scrabble. Scrabble.

‘No, wait. Look.’

I raise the smaller of the halves and peer upwards into it. Tarzan is inside. An arm is hooped nonchalantly over a metal catch. He looks like a diamond thief hanging in the roof space of a museum. Just as I’m admiring the rakish angle of his ears, he lets go, lands in the leaves, and takes off through the undergrowth in a manner that can only be described as a furry bullet fired in anger.

‘Look at him go,’ says Britta. She is ruining her hardline image by scattering muesli about the place. ‘Will we see him again?’

‘Are you kidding? He’ll be back at the house before we are.’

We both laugh. What a funny idea!

The laughter peters out.

‘Well, we should probably get back anyway.’

‘True. You know what? I might jog. It’s a nice morning.’

It comes after a number of people in Azerbaijan were questioned by police after voting for a song by neighbouring Armenia in this year’s contest.

One bloke had been told he was a ‘potential security threat’ for sending a text backing Armenia’s song, Jan Jan.

The article goes on:

The country’s authorities said people had merely been invited to explain why they voted for Armenia.

Reminds me of post-revolutionary France, where people were merely invited to have a lie down on a bench and enjoy the sights and sounds of Paris from the comfort of a straw-filled basket.

► BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Eurovision changes privacy rule

‘Build him?’ I asked the empty house. ‘A bigger one?’

So we acquired a gerbil called Coffee. Cream, his companion, had long since been taken away because of a problem with her genitalia – they were compatible with Coffee’s.

On his arrival, I remember regarding this gerbil sceptically (and being regarded, in turn, with equal scepticism). Coffee was quite small, even for a gerbil. And his behaviour was odd. Unlike our other gerbil, Erich, he didn’t produce Road Runner-style clouds of slowly settling dust and a ‘peow’ sound when I blinked. I wondered, therefore, whether he was somehow defective. My suspicions were reinforced when I tried to stroke his head: he didn’t take a big, wet bite of my finger. Instead, Coffee permitted me to touch him with rather more equanimity than I would offer if, for instance, a giant gerbil had opened the front door tried to touch me up with an aircraft escape slide.

Hmm, I thought. We shall have to see how we get on.

A couple of weeks later, when Britta observed that it was time for Coffee (and partner-in-grime Erich) to take his place in her office at work, I offered the opinion that moving the mice was all well and good, but that I had become somewhat – cough – attached to them. At this point, I grasped my lapels in a lawyerly fashion and turned my gaze to the ceiling.

‘So you do like them!’ There was a note of triumph in her voice.

‘It is possible I’ve habituated to the bloody racket they make when I’m trying to watch Dr Who; though I may never know what the Doctor said to that tree-being last week.’

That was four years ago. Nobody is quite sure when Coffee was born. He was probably approaching his fifth birthday when he died. He had been doddery and getting weaker for several months. Gone were the days when he could skip up the pipe from the ‘desert biome’ and balance on the edge of his food bowl. Last Sunday morning, having been unwell all weekend, and being blind and unable to move properly, Coffee died. I’d been up with him on the Saturday, fairly determined that he wouldn’t die alone (his colleague Erich showing no signs of sympathy), but in the end I had to go to bed. I left him leaning against his food bowl because he couldn’t stand up without help.

There had been a moment of lucidity just after midnight on Saturday. Abruptly, Coffee seemed to wake up and notice me. Perhaps he was irritated by the Nutella, peanut butter and other high-energy, easily-chewed things I was trying to push into his mouth on the small end of a tea spoon. But he turned and sniffed and shuffled in a very lopsided way to the open door of the hutch. I put my palm out, as I always did, and Coffee managed to struggle on to it. Then I folded my arms and Coffee made it to the crook of my elbow. From there, on countless occasions over the years, he’d been taken on a tour of the living room. Sometimes we would stop at the hutches of the other gerbils for a quick hello, or we’d relax on the sofa for a while, or – on special occasions – Coffee would have the run of the living room floor itself. On this occasion, however, he just sat in the crook of my arm and tried to breathe. I took him on the tour anyway.

Coffee was really great. He’d never harmed anyone (we harmed his breakfast of mealworms on his behalf by freeze-drying them; he wasn’t to know) or treated strange humans with anything less than curiosity. He wasn’t the size of a dog or a cat. He could fit in the palm of my hand and when he ran across the keyboard of my laptop, his weight wasn’t enough to depress the keys. He was just a gerbil. But a great little gerbil.

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Epilogue

‘Do you think we should show Erich Coffee’s body?’ asked Britta. ‘He might start looking for him. It would give him closure.’

‘Hmm.’ I held Coffee up to the gerbil with whom he’d shared his life.

‘That’s so sweet! He’s nibbling Coffee’s ear.’

‘Hmm.’

‘And look, he’s really digging his teeth in.’

‘He’s trying to eat Coffee.’

‘He’s not, he’s -’

‘Erich, you disgust me.’

‘Better get him a mealworm.’

One of the muscles in my shoulder has been torn. Not in a knife fight, or reaching to pull a toddler back from a cliff’s edge. No; I wore a heavy rucksack for a bit. My girlfriend – who has been visiting a private osteopath for a few months – poked vulturishly at my arm and announced, not without triumph, that the only thing was for me to see an osteopath; her osteopath.

“But it only hurts when I salute. I read the Guardian; I don’t salute.” Manly pause, looking into the middle distance. “I’ll do this my way.”

I resolved to visit the (frankly ineffectual) NHS physiotherapist who had helped me with a running-induced hip injury last year. Unfortunately, this meant talking to my GP first. After three days of calling the surgery just after 8 a.m. to arrange an appointment – each request met by a chuckle and a statement that all the appointments were gone for the day, and that perhaps I should consider calling in one of the other quantum interstices between 8:00:00 a.m. and 8:00:01 a.m., which are infinite after all – I drew a chunk of cash from the Morrison’s ATM and booked an appointment with my girlfriend’s osteopath.

So here I am.

Her upside-down head moves into my visual field and she says, “You’ll have to tell me when it hurts.”

“Really? You think I should verbalise? I hadn’t thought of that. You’re right, though, it’s the perfect solution to my body-wide, dribble-inducing torment,” is what I never, ever say because it is indeed the case that I find it impossible to admit that primordial pain signals are petitioning my brain, thusly:

‘Excuse me,’ says my arm (which is English), ‘but I’m about to break.’

‘Pipe down,’ replies my brain, ‘it’s important to uphold pointless social norms.’

Arm: ‘But we’re lying here on this table in Ian’s special ‘going out’ underwear and odd socks. I think that social norms have gone by the wayside.’

Brain: ‘It’s not your job to think. Now, she’s about to grind the shoulder socket like a millstone. Stay frosty and alert.’

Stiff upper lip: ‘Hear, hear.’

My osteopath is utterly professional, and I cling to the knowledge of her long years of training as my body creaks, snaps, squeaks and shudders. I fantasise a peculiar analogue of esprit d’escalier in which I walk into a wardrobe at home and shriek into the towels.

Occasionally – when the man tears grow at the corner of my eyes and the massage table has gained a perfect record of my incisors – I’ll say, “Ooh, that’s really loosened the muscle,” going falsetto on the word ‘really’ and dilating my pupils independently.

“Yeah? Let’s work on this muscle for a bit.”

I go rigid with fear.

“Wow,” she says, “there’s still some tension in this one.”

“Gah.”

“OK, lie on your back for me and cross your arms. I think you’ll need some hot and cold treatment on the muscle for the next few days.”

“No pain, no gain,” I say, one of the few sentences whose syntax is within my brain’s grasp.

The osteopath leans across me.

“Now, don’t worry.”

I begin to worry.

Her upside-down face smiles and she lies across my folded arms.

“I’m going to keep one foot on the floor.”

As the osteopath bounces lightly up and down, like a darts player rehearsing a treble-twenty, the air leaving my lungs gets rather more pressurised than I’d like, adding occasional Tourettish volume to my words: “What does the FLOOR have to DO with iii-IT?”

Suddenly, she drops her weight through my chest. A sound comes from my back that reminds me of a door hinge being ripped from a frame. A warm feeling spreads down my body. Have I wet myself? I panic: What are the social rules in such a situation?

“Yes,” she says, as though continuing a thought, “you’ve been through an unusual amount of pain.”

I haven’t wet myself – that can come later, on the cycle ride home.

“Hot and cold treatment?” I croak.

“Yes, and I’ll definitely need to see you next week. OK?”

While my Id and Ego start slapping and poking each other in the race to gain control of my mouth, the Super Ego steps in and says, “That would be lovely!”

On the way out, I – or rather the piece of jelly shaped like me – give the secretary a weak salute.