Despite the Question Time fever, the finale of Masterchef and the Man Utd v Bayern Munich game, we ran clean out of chairs at Horsell Village Hall this evening for the Horsell Residents Association AGM. Sometimes these evenings can be a draining experience but never with HRA – Rob Harris keeps a firm hand on the tiller and ensures that all the official business is dealt with in 30 minutes or so before we welcome a guest presentation.

Last year, it was Marilyn Scott of the Lightbox, this year Paul Rimmer and David Robbins of Horsell Common Preservation Society gave the audience a good grounding in the history, management and natural aspects of the common. HCPS is a superb organisation that does a lot of work for our environment in Horsell that one suspects would be a good deal less well done if left to other authorities to achieve. Membership is only £10 and can be attained here.

I addressed the meeting for a couple of minutes on the LDF character studies that I think could be important in helping to preserve some of the more unique areas of the village. Given that the old Urban Areas of Special Residential Character, which gave some form of assurance to those in areas of urban heritage merit, are disappearing, I think it’s vital for us to put our views forward about the areas that we consider important now. If we don’t, it makes it very difficult at a later stage to oppose planning applications in areas on the grounds of urban heritage and preserving the streetscene.

The old UASRC are a good place to start – The Ridgeway, Grange Road, Heath and Castle Roads, but not necessarily exclusive. Waldens Park Road, Kettlewell Hill and Manor Road are also areas with historic properties in them that speak about the village’s history. It would be a shame if we did not act now to give them the best possible chance of being preserved. I’ll be totally honest with you; my experience of the planning system is that it is an inequitable rich man’s game - a system where central government dictates the rules to local residents via their planning authorities to the benefit of big developers. Developers can afford agents, planning experts, legal advisors and to play the appeals process - residents can rarely match this.

But what we must do is make sure that we give ourselves the best possible chance by taking advantage of what democratic elements the system does afford and that is what I would like to see happen.

Finally, if anyone’s not a member of HRA, please consider it - we really would like to be able to do more but need more members and income in order to give residents a better service.

Learning that you are sharing your dwelling with mice is a problem that goes back to the dawn of civilisation. And many thousands of years later, the methods of controlling them haven’t changed hugely. About two weeks ago I noticed something dark on the floor out of the corner of my eye when on the XBox – it immediately shot back down into our as yet unfinished (and unfurnished) fireplace.

Subsequent inquiry unearthed a rather unpleasant trail of evidence that suggested Mr Mouse’s appearance that night was not his first. My other half isn’t keen on mice and wouldn’t go downstairs until I promised to block up the fireplace temporarily. While I’m not what I’d call an animal lover insofar as I wouldn’t consider a domestic pet, I am a nature lover and animals form an important part of that tapestry. So I bought some live traps with the hope of releasing the mice on Horsell Common.

After baiting them with raisins, nothing happened for about 72 hours. Then I came down one morning to find two live traps activated – but neither contained a mouse and one didn’t contain any bait either. I spent  hours trying to figure out how any mouse could have got into the trap, taken the bait and got out again while leaving the trap activatated. I’m still not entirely sure.

So after having read up a bit more on the subject, including about the diseases the mice can spread and the fact that house mice don’t get on terribly well in the wild when released anyway, I decided to get tough and set some regular traps. It seemed the kindest thing to do for the mouse as well, given it was likely simply to find another house and get trapped there instead. In addition, I had another sighting of our mouse, this time in the kitchen. Even though I saw it and blocked what I believed were all the escape routes, was it behind our fridge when I pulled it out? Of course not.

So I baited up four traps – three behind the fridge and one elsewhere. I came down this morning to find that the one elsewhere and one behind the fridge had been relieved of their bait but were still cocked for action with not a rodent in sight. Another trap had had its bait nibbled at but not totally removed. I have to admit at being impressed with the ingenuity of my opponent.

And apparently, this isn’t uncommon. More reading online has suggested that a) Mice can seemingly disappear through solid walls b) they have learned how to evade and avoid traps (presumably the fact that these traps have been the same for many hundreds of generations of mice doesn’t help) and c) peanut butter is the suggested bait because it is sticky and difficult to remove without triggering hazards.

I have now invested in two superior traps as well as a jar of peanut butter. There is also a suggestion for a different kind of trap – a homemade one – that mice haven’t evolved to avoid. My father thinks I should poison them but I’m loath to do this - apart from anything else, using the destructive power of human chemical knowledge seems an unfair advantage and akin to an admission of defeat.

If the wily mouse wants a contest, a contest it shall have.

Update 18/12: Poor Mr Mouse lost the contest sometime between midnight and 8am this morning in our dining room. His last meal was peanut butter and I can vouch that it was almost painless – a good clean trap. He may have been a highly-developed scavenger rodent but he was no match for the power of the Rentokil Advanced Mouse Trap and currently awaits collection by Woking Borough Council in my residual waste bin.

My other half was very relieved. “How did he look?” she asked. Er, I think it’s fair to say that he’d looked better…

Well that’s it, it’s now 2010 and a very Happy New Year to you. It’s been a fantastic New Year’s Day – a bit chilly but lovely and sunny and if you’ve been walking on the common today, I hope you enjoyed the midwinter stillness as I did.

It’s going to be a busy year. I hope by the end of it, the country will be going in a different direction, I will be happily married and have done justice to my election campaign, whatever the outcome. There are also one or two other things that I hope will also go my way too – but more of those if and when they happen.

What I’m not going to do is try to predict what 2010 – or the 2010s – will bring. I find this kind of filler journalism very annoying – and it doesn’t cover very well for the fact that no-one’s in the office today and they’ve had to get all the material written by other people. The truth is that at the beginning of 2000 we had no idea that September 11 would happen just 21 months later and change the landscape of world affairs for the decade.

At any time - and not just at the beginning of decades – a major event could occur to change world history and the direction of humankind. In 2001, it was tragic not only that 3,000 people were killed in the September 11 bombings but that event gave a definition – The War on Terror – to the whole decade that followed. The 2000s have been characterised as a bad decade, associated with slaughter in the Middle East and an escalation of the extremist Christian/Islamic tensions as well as economic mismanagement and failure.

That may be so, but for me the 2000s were all about my 20s and I enjoyed them nevertheless. What I do know about them is that a) I would never have imagined on January 1, 2000 that a few months later a terrorist group would bring down one of the world’s most iconic structures using hijacked passenger airplanes and b) that money invested in the FTSE-100 on that day would be worth less on December 31, 2009. Therefore predicting the future is, at best, a vanity.

While September 11 and recession are serious subjects, scaling things down a little I think part of the fun of life is not knowing what comes next. We all accept our inevitable milestones – marriage, births, deaths, promotions and life goals, although some are less welcome than others. But the bits that come in between - the unforseen opportunities and challenges – are what make life vivid and test our morals, abilities and fibre.

Long may they remain unforseen, even by BBC journalists.

Horsell Common with Heather Farm on far left and Common Close visible

I’ve never quite understood why a possible site for one of Surrey’s two required energy-from-waste plants was smack bang in the middle of a Site of Special Scientific Interest.

Horsell Common is a precious resource – a haven for wildlife and rare plants, a respite from the bustling town life all around, a place for walking dogs and riding horses and somewhere of cultural importance to Woking being identified so clearly in HG Wells’s War of The Worlds. It stretches much farther than the width of Shores Road and cuts across the majority of the west and east Horsell areas. It is generally undervalued within Woking but has a number of staunch supporters who are dedicated to protecting it and its natural beauty and preserving it for others to enjoy.

What it is not is the correct place to site a large industrial building for generating power. It is not a place where large vehicles can enter and exit easily and it should be protected from the noise, odours and detritus of medium-scale industrial activity. To me, this is plainly obvious; but two sets of local authority officers have worked in such a way as to make exactly such an industrial eyesore a realistic possibility. Thankfully, it now looks unlikely.

Horsell Common Preservation Society has successfully argued to overturn a Woking Borough Council planning decision against a change of use for the site to include small-scale industrial and storage buildings. The borough council refused the application on the basis that the Surrey Waste Plan had set aside the site as a possible location for one of its two energy-from-waste plants. But the inspector decided there were compelling reasons – not least of them concerning HCPS’s control over access to the site – that meant Heather Farm was unlikely to be viable prospect as a EFW location and he granted the original application.

His report is pretty clear and it won’t make for comforting reading at county hall. But it should do in Horsell; if a buyer can be found to take on the operation of the site, we should have seen off the bizarre prospect of a waste plant on the doorstep of one of the county’s most environmentally sensitive areas.