I scale the height of my lofty ambition

It had been quiet up there all week, so, being a champion straw-grasper, I chose to assume the problem had gone away. But by 3am on Sunday, after two hours of listening to the Hulk line-dance across my bedroom ceiling, "sorting the loft" went to the top of that morning's to-do list.

Old clothes, wellies, hat, gardening gloves, phone, ladder. Good to go. Finding the Hulk's entry point in the eaves involved lying flat like a polar bear on thin ice and pulling myself over dust-saturated insulation laid by me eight years ago on top of the world's narrowest joists. After 10 choking minutes I finally shifted a piece of insulation and found myself blinking in bright sunlight. There was a gap of four by nine inches which hadn't been there before the guttering was renewed; it was enough.

I'm assuming the Hulk is a grey squirrel, though it could be a small warthog for all I know. But a squirrel broke a wire on one of the bird feeders about nine months ago and the animal has grown to legendary cartoon-character size on the whole nuts he's extracted ever since. I left him to it until a couple of weeks ago because I rather admired his gall, but now that the fledgling season has arrived I've taken that particular feeder down because baby birds choke if their parents ram whole peanuts down their throats.

So line-dancing up and down my loft and tearing up the insulation is simply payback as far as the Hulk is concerned. Mystery solved. I plugged the hole and swam my way back to the trapdoor. That's when I saw more daylight, this time beyond endless pipes coming out at all angles next to the water tank. To plug the gap would involve wiggling through the centre of a triangle of pipes no bigger than Jeremy Clarkson's head.

Now, I'm not afraid of spiders, or the dark, but I'm not mad about small spaces and you can't wiggle through a hole like that without wishing you'd checked your mobile could get a signal first. I plugged that guttering gap in record time considering my head was tucked under the eaves and twisted round like Regan's in The Exorcist while my legs were still on the other side of the pipe hole. Whatever my plumber charged for putting in that water tank, it wasn't nearly enough.

The rest of the day was reward time. I planted chitted Mimi salad potatoes into recycled compost bags, sowed perennial Verbena bonariensis into a seed tray and potted on my sweet pea seedlings, all the while coughing up eight years' worth of black dust. Believe me, the sun couldn't go over the yardarm fast enough.