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.