Why would a weasel be riding a woodpecker?

It's a weasel riding on the back of a green woodpecker. What a marvellous sight to behold. I've never really trusted weasels after they crept into Toad Hall and had a giant party with a load of stoats. How do you tell the difference between a weasel and a stoat? A weasel is weasily recognised and a stoat is stoatally different. Thanks dad.

If further evidence was needed that all roads eventually lead back to either Kevin Bacon or the Yorkshire Dales, Kenneth Grahame apparently got the inspiration for Wind in the Willows by sitting in the Queen's Head dining room eating Sunday lunch, drinking a pint of lager tops and looking across the dale to Wild Wood, the wood beside the A684 before you get to Akebar.

It's one of life's great irritants that the majority of people can't tell the difference between weasels and stoats. If I had my way, it would be the first lesson all children learnt at school.

"Right, there's the toilet, lunch is at noon, and a stoat has a black tip on its tail and is a good deal bigger – now about those letters and numbers ..."

I've put a lot of thought into possible scenarios that resulted in the weasel coming to be on the back of a woodpecker – too much if truth be told. I think the most likely is that the woodpecker owed the weasel money after a late-night card game. Obviously woodpeckers do not have opposable thumbs to open their wallets and so this particular bird offered to carry the stoat on its back for the day instead.

So, anyway, that anecdote. The teenagers are very good with their young sister. Or maybe it should be the other way round. Anyway, their mum looked in to the front room recently to find a boy and the baby hard at play.

"What are you two up to?" she asked.

"Technically, mum, there's four of us, as we've both got a doll," replied the boy without hesitation or shame.