Life . . .
Hellhounds are eating. The world is a beautiful place again (for the moment). Happy Independence Day. In spite of the bats. I DID NOT SLEEP WONDERFULLY WELL LAST NIGHT. Every time a snail tripped over a pebble outdoors I shot awake, convinced it was bats playing pinochle in the bathroom.* When I got up this morning this was the t shirt I was moved to put on:
I need to learn to use the 'delay' button so I can take pictures of myself without recourse to the bathroom mirror.
But it has not been a bad day . . . yet, she says cautiously, since I’m still at the mews and haven’t been back to the cottage since this afternoon. But I peeled the screen up from the corner of the bathroom window again (sigh) for easy Chiropteran departure and closed the bathroom door, not that creatures who can osmose through solid frelling walls couldn’t get under/over/through it, but it might encourage them to look around for an easier exit first. And—because I am a wet knee-jerk liberal eco leftie—I’ve put out several frelling saucers of frelling water because in this weather (it’s HOT again) dehydration has got to be a danger zone for tiny panicking things. I also went out this morning and nervously looked in the various places where I’d left all five of yesterday’s visitors . . . and they were all gone. Whew. Yes, something might have got them, but in my walled garden it’s a lot likelier they just said/squeaked/whistled the bat-equivalent of whew, and flew away.
And . . . I had rather a good voice lesson. Relatively speaking. I’m still not ready to audition for the Seraphim. Maybe I was just extra-glad to see Nadia after a fortnight away. But she asked me in a firm, schoolmistressy, you’d-better-come-up-with-something manner, what was going well with practise at home and after I said GAAAAAAAH I said that I was noticing that some of the stuff she was telling me was finally sinking in—that I felt I wasn’t quite totally dependent on the weekly teacher-magic any more . . . and the interesting thing is that I’d been thinking that maybe for the first time today while I was warming up before I went off for my lesson. And she snickered and said, I told you there was about a six-month time lag. —I’ve just been looking back, and my first voice lesson with her was on Valentine’s Day. Hey, I’m precocious. I’m a whole fortnight early.
Oh and . . . yeah. I’m going to sing in the Muddles’ concert. I am out of my infinitesimal mind. But even Nadia is saying, if your choir director is telling you to sing in the concert, you should frelling sing in the frelling concert. Whatever. . . .
* * *
* Those of you who follow me on Twitter will know that when I got back to the cottage last night there were four bats waiting for me. Four.^ Four, that is, more bats after the one I’d found earlier. And here there is a wailing and a rending of garments. Atlas is coming back tomorrow and we’re going to take everything out of the linen cupboard in the bathroom again and look for fresh holes since it seems to be the bathroom where they’re coming in (again). I found two of them at the bottom of the pitchers beside the bath—which means I went round today and turned all my jugs, pitchers, vases, ewers and whatnot mouth down again—and two more of them crushed against the back of the first (or last, depending on how you’re counting) riser at the top of the stair, right outside the bathroom door. The fifth one, I admit, landed with a plop in the middle of the kitchen floor but until I am forced to think otherwise I’m going to hope she’d come down from upstairs.
This was yesterday afternoon's advance scout exploring the cardboard box I had her in indoors till the sun subsided a little.
And I was snarlingly reminded of the standard useless advice about capturing your bat—you’re supposed to do a large version of the drinking glass and bit of cardboard that you use for putting bees and spiders and bugs outdoors. Bats are tiny but they’re not that tiny . . . and in my increasingly vast experience of bats indoors I don’t think I’ve ever yet had a situation where you could employ a pudding-basin and a sheet of cardboard effectively—by the time I could have fetched my pudding-basin for the one in the middle of the floor last night, she had scampered over to the Aga and flattened herself against the adjoining cupboard. The two that had pretty much become one with the level-cut double-twist 100% wool pile were extremely difficult to pry free—you know how stair risers tend to slant slightly backward toward the bottom angle with the next tread down—and as I keep saying they’re SO LITTLE you are in a constant state of anxiety about hurting them. And these two were only about two-thirds size—babies. Two-thirds-grown babies, but still babies. Littler than little.
There are comfy paper towels and one of my ubiquitous saucers of water at the other end, but she's an adventurer.
And they were all wrapped up together—what I thought of was two teeny-tiny miniature hellhounds holding onto each other for dear life because they didn’t know where they were and they were frightened and unhappy. Which made me frightened and unhappy, of course, because I am a wet knee-jerk liberal eco leftie. The thing still is that I don’t want a godsblasted exclusion license. I can’t believe it would work—it might work in a modern house, and bats mysteriously often like modern houses, but you only have to look at my 200-plus-year-old roof line to know that there’s nothing neat, tidy or square-cornered about the house under it. And second, and this is where the wet eco leftie comes in, where would they all go? I have over four hundred pipistrelles living in my roof! And while pipistrelles are not on the endangered list they are protected for the very good reason that their populations have plummeted and I totally want bats around eating bugs!^^
And yes there is also a LID so she was still IN the box when I got back later to put her outdoors. But I can't help being a bit fascinated by creatures THAT I FRELLING LIVE WITH.
^ The first bats I’ve seen indoors in several weeks arrive on the Fourth of July. What were they looking for? Corn on the cob and blueberry pie?
^^ Bats do pollinate, but not in the UK apparently. Never mind. Serious bug eating is enough.+
+ I knew fruit bats pollinated, and I was just googling whether there’s any bat pollination in the UK which there apparently is not . . . but there are a lot of ‘Pipistrelle Cottages’ out there. Are these people CRAZY? Is this supposed to be a ROMANTIC name? Mind you I’ve started calling the cottage Bat Cottage, but I’m not trying to hire it out as luxury accommodation either.
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