My family and other animals
Just back from a really great holiday in Edinburgh. Scotland is much more enjoyable in spring than summer. The weather is usually far better and you can walk through the streets of Edinburgh without tripping over hooray-henries making their annual pilgrimage to tread the boards over the Festival period. Bliss. I enjoyed it so much I found myself (briefly) thinking about living there again but had a reality check and questioned whether I really wanted to live in a country that finds it necessary to have ‘suitable for vegetarians’ printed on cartons of orange juice. Anyway, after enduring the grottiest flight I’ve ever been on with some rather unedifying compatriots we arrived home and within a short time it was as if we had never been away.
I went to have a shower and found our bath filled with termites. I could have cried. This time last year our house resembled something from a horror film when one day a huge – and I mean HUGE (think biblical) – swarm of termites decided to leave the walls they had been munching away on unbeknownst to us, and fly around our house. There were tens of thousands of the wee buggers in a large black cloud. They died almost immediately and we spent the next couple of days sweeping up little wings and corpses. It was gruesome. We called a pest control guy who came to assess the situation and set a day to fumigate the house. The day before he was due to spray I went into the spare bedroom to be confronted by a shower of squiggly little wormy things. The bed was a writhing mass and they were literally raining down from a beam above. My mum had been sleeping in that bed only a couple of weeks beforehand – can you imagine if her holiday had been two weeks later? It doesn’t bare thinking about. Anyhow, after a hysterical phone call, the pest control guy came immediately, we moved out for a bit, he did his thing and it was guaranteed for 15 years. In the meantime I should point out that this guy is barking mad. The first time he came he started stroking (caressing) our banister and turned to LH and said ‘I don’t know what it is about these old houses but all this wood makes me feel… mmmmm … horny.’ Totally loco. I don’t know if the lure of the wood was so strong that he decided to do a rubbish job in order to ensure another visit but a year later and we were again living in the Hammer House of Horrors. He came last week and, for fear of repeating myself, we moved out for a bit, he did his thing and it was guaranteed for 15 years. A week later, and it’s like Groundhog Day. The bath is still filling up with termites on a daily basis and we have another appointment with the Frisky Fumigator this afternoon.
Sticking with the subject of unwanted creatures in the house, the other day I woke up to piles of feathers all over the kitchen. It was like a duvet had burst. Had a look for a dead bird but saw nothing so assumed my darling cats had taken their plaything back outside however went downstairs at lunchtime and saw a poor pigeon sitting in the kitchen looking at me beseechingly. One of its wings was mangled but otherwise it appeared rather chipper, all things considered. I made a panicked call to LH asking him to come home from work and deal with the pigeon (I’m squeamish and didn’t want to see any blood). He very nicely told me where to go, so I put it in a box and took it to my shop to wait until vets reopened. My lovely husband is as nuts as I am and in the meantime had been making phone calls to find a vet specialising in birds. Having found one miles away, outside Nicosia, he picked our new friend up after work. I then received a phone call from him telling me we had two options. One was to put the wee thing to sleep and the other was for him to have an operation (€100) to have his wing amputated and then he’d have to live in a cage. After establishing whether he could be happy living in a cage with one wing – according to the vet, yes, – I didn’t know what to do.
LH said he would take an executive decision. When he came home I assumed pigeon had joined the big pie in the sky, however (I repeat that he is as nuts as I am), LH had given the vet €25 to keep the bird in overnight while we thought about it and tried to find him a home. You may find this hard to believe but it is really quite difficult finding a home for a one armed pigeon. What’s wrong with people???!!! The following day, still no closer to deciding Mr Pigeon’s fate, LH called another bird specialist who told him that pigeons’ raison d’etre is to mate and that they live life in pairs so our pigeon wouldn’t be happy with a solitary existence in a cage after all, so RIP Mr Pigeon. Sometimes I wonder why I love cats so much.
A Pigeon In My Kitchen And Termites In My Bath. Sounds like a bad Country and Western song. I just popped downstairs to make a coffee while finishing this off and found my feline friends have very kindly left me a gift of a half eaten lizard. Scotland with its vegetarian orange juice is suddenly becoming rather appealing.
