(Actually this also sounds as though it's timetravelled from An Earlier Day and the improving literature thereof.)

‘They’re beautiful’: 13-year-olds lead audacious project to save harvest mice in Devon:

Best friends Eva Wishart and Emily Smith had become devoted to harvest mice, and were upset, a couple of years ago, to find out the species is threatened in England due to farming practices and habitat loss.
The two girls took matters into their own hands and decided to replenish local harvest mice stocks themselves. In the two years since, they have bred dozens of the tiny rodents in their garages and on Wednesday they released 250 of them into a nature reserve near Wishart’s home.

It totally has elements of heart-warming Britflick though -

Wishart and Smith, the two young naturalists, raised the mice in 27 tanks in their homes, with some sourced from a tip by Smith’s mother. Honeysuckle and hazel, plants the mice love to climb, were harvested from Wishart’s garden to place in the tanks.... The pair managed to finance the project, including buying the mice and commissioning the enclosure, with £4,000 crowdfunded from the public. They reached their goal after a boost from the well-known nature presenter Chris Packham, who shared it with his millions of nature-loving social media followers.

Wishart’s first foray into mice husbandry almost ended in disaster: “I was given four mice by ecologist Derek Gow, but we kept them in enclosures outside and the neighbour’s cat ate three of them. We saved the fourth, which was pregnant and had some pups.

What I read

Finished A World to Win, and decided not to go straight on to next.

Read Anthony Powell, The Soldier's Art (Dance to the Music of Time #8) (1966), which is a very different angle on WW2 as Nick Jenkins is stuck in a backwater with Widmerpool. A particularly grim episode in its much quieter register.

Started Elaine Castillo, Moderation (2025) which started out fairly strongly, then hit a saggy point, and then I discovered I'd been a bit misled over its genre position, and anyway didn't feel much like continuing.

Picked off the shelf Susan Kelly, And Soon I'll Come to Kill You (Liz Connors #5) (1991), from the period when I was reading a lot more crime novels like this. It's not bad - at least Our Heroine has a plausible reason for getting mixed up in criminal matters, as a journalist specialising in crime reporting, but she has the almost obigatory for period/genre cop boyfriend. This one was probably a bit atypical of the series as a whole as it involved someone with a grudge against her (there are several suspects for Reasons to do with past reporting etc) stalking her with malign intent.

Andrea Long Chu, Females (2025), because I'd found Authority interesting and read something about this but while I am all for rediscovery of the out-there voices of the 'second wave', riffing off V Solanas was just a bit niche.

Laurie R King, Knave of Diamonds (Mary Russell & Sherlock Holmes, #19) (2025) - Kobo deal at the weekend - seriously phoning it in - scraping the bottom of the barrel -

On the go

Val McDermid, A Darker Domain (Inspector Karen Pirie #2) (2008) for some reason Kobo were doing a serious promotional deal on the McDermid Pirie series at the weekend so I thought, why not?

Up next

New Slightly Foxed perhaps.