Fiction Ed Shirley Is Up To Bat
So, casual question: how do you get a bat out of your living room?
Last night Mr Fiction Ed and I were sitting in post-chip-van-tea contentment, him watching the golf from wherever, me catching up with the papers.
Then Mr Fiction Ed flinched, uttered a “Jeez!” and leapt up out of his chair.
I caught a blur of something out of the corner of my eye.
“Woah, that’s a big moth,” I thought.
But it was no moth. It was a bat, flying round and round in circles above our heads.
“What is it?” Mr Fiction Ed asked. By this time he had somehow swirled himself into the curtain like a magician.
“A bat,” I said.
“Oh, that’s bad news” he said, from his curtain cocoon.
You think?
“Get it into the conservatory! Get it into the conservatory!” he shouted.
Who? Me?
Flashbacks
It reminded me of a holiday in Tenerife years ago.
On the night we arrived — me, him and my big sis — we did the usual first thing of checking out the rooms in the apartment.
We opened the bathroom door to find a massive cockroach on the tiles above the wash-hand basin, antennae waggling.
I’d never seen one before, but I got a right close look at this one . . . because before I knew it, I’d been thrust into the room and the door shut behind me.
“Do you need anything?” he shouted from the safety of the other side.
“Er — a wide-mouthed bowl, or something to put over it?”
A plastic coffee filter thing did the trick.
So, anyway, what I’m saying is that my hero husband has previous in such circumstances . . .
I opened the conservatory doors wide and stood back, and somehow we — I — managed to divert the bat’s path.
I slammed the doors behind it, and then we watched through the glass as it flew round and round.
Now what?
To be continued . . .
Regular readers may remember Shirley’s own “previous” with the pheasants . . .
For more tales of the unexpected, read Shirley’s blog here.
