It is a well known fact that insects, once they get into the house, can’t find the way out again.
Birds and Bees
It's the case of bees in particular that amazes me. They can find their hive from a selection of many from a kilometre away, yet if they get into the house they can’t find a doorway two foot away from the window that they are banging their heads against.
Birds are the same. They might be able to migrate thousands of miles with pin-point accuracy, but give them a choice of exit of an open door or a closed window and they will choose the window.
I have had three starlings down the chimney in the last few days. The first starling took 2 days to finally descend to the grate. After a bit I got used to the racket from inside the chimney breast, but I was pleased when it ceased.Unsurprisingly the bird was quite docile when I opened the door, so I grabbed it in a towel and escorted it outside with no bother.
The second bird descended after about 24 hours. Learning from my experience with bird #1 I took the towel (the same towel; I’ll never get it clean, and it is now the official Bird Towel) and opened the door, upon which a turbo-charged starling burst out from within the grate.
It carefully avoided the open door and crashed full force into the living room window. It paused for a milli second, then headed for the ceiling. It hit the ceiling hard and plummetted to the floor apparently undamaged. It picked itself up and headed straight for the telly.
Oh no, if a bird strike can down a Jumbo jet plane, what can a starling strike do to a telly? At the last moment it achieved sufficient altitude, grazed the top of the telly and cannoned into the window behind. This third cranial impact must have slowed it somewhat. It fell to the floor amid the serpentine loops of inexplicable wiring that lurk behind the telly.
I must admit that at this point my concern was more for the well-being of the telly than the bird, but while I pondered how on earth to get it out without damaging the most expensive piece of kit in my house it rose in a flurry of soot and hurtled into the kitchen, and the kitchen window. The force of the impact knocked it into the sink, and also apparently knocked some sense into it. It scrambled out of the sink and flew out through the open kitchen door.
I surveyed the damage; One telly miraculously intact. Bird-shaped outlines in soot on the ceiling, the floor, 3 windows, one wall and the sink. Phew! Nothing broken!
So when the third bird descended I learnt from my experience with bird #2. I pulled down the blinds and hung the windows and the telly with towels to make them dark and damaged-proof, and opened the doors to the outside world. I opened the fireplace door and out it streaked, straight through the front door and through the porch - which is meshed.
It was free –wonderful! Apparently not! It about turned in mid-flight and cannoned into the porch mesh from the outside. It re-grouped and flew back inside the porch through the door, did a semi-circle, and crashed into the same area of mesh from the inside.
Quickly realising its mistake it flew out of the door, turned around and flew back into the open door from the outside.
By this time I had caught up with it. I slammed the porch door shut. It did a circuit above the pool (please, not in the pool) and disappeared, presumably with a headache.
I need someone to go upon my roof and replace the Anti-Starling wire over the chimney – I’m ignoring the 6 bird-shaped soot stains on my walls and ceiling, as well as the further 3 similar stains on my porch meshing!
It’ll only take...
An Hour Tops
All I had to do was nip into Fontalmazora on behalf of my neighbour and ask for someone with the necessary knowledge and equipment to visit and seek a suspected leak.
But if I was going to take Henry out then I might as well make it worth his while and do some other non-urgent jobs at the same time.
Initially I had no other jobs needing attention, but I bent my brain to the task and came up with four other destinations. Shouldn’t take me long. I’ll be back in no time.
I started with Fontalmanzora, the only essential task on my to-do list. It didn’t take me long, and in no time I was Arboleas-bound.
I needed to recycle some paper, and Arboleas has a paper bin, right next to the Farmácia, so I could get my pills and get rid of my recycling paper; two jobs got done at once. It was only a hop and a skip from there to the charity shop with stuff that I had sorted out during lockdown but hadn’t yet passed on. That didn’t take long, either.
The mobile and I had had a serious falling-out that morning, so as I was in Arboleas I decided to pop into the phone shop and ask Ali to frighten it into submission for me. Up until now it had all been plain sailing, but here’s where it began to get sticky.
‘Have you dropped it?’ He asked.
Knowing how clumsy I am I answered ‘Probably.’
‘It can be repaired, but it will be 80€, and there is no guarantee with a repair.’
The subtext was ‘It’ll be cheaper to buy a new one.’
‘OK, but can you transfer the sim? I need to keep the same number and my contacts.’
‘Yes, but it will take half an hour.’
So up to the Colmena I went and partook of an early lunch or late breakfast, I’m not sure which. I dragged my heels, knowing the likely interpretation of half an hour in Spanish time. I was right. ‘I haven’t done it yet. I have to do each contact manually, because it is broken.’ He said. ‘And I am very busy.’
I could see he was speaking the truth – while I was there one customer would leave the shop and another would come in. ‘I’ll come back tomorrow.’ I sighed. So far my quick nip out had resulted in four tasks successfully completed and one ongoing, so my ‘quick nip out’ was going to stretch into tomorrow.
On the way back home I bought Henry some petrol – I felt he deserved it. I often wonder where the time goes, and this is how my one hour trip had stretched into a two day marathon!
Now I need somebody to show me how to drive my new phone. And I bet that won’t be a quick job either!
I had a Predicament this week!
Kiss?
All was well as Henry (the car) and I rolled tranquilly through the blistering August world. Then I noticed an orange light. Henry doesn’t like it if I ignore his orange lights, and I don’t like Henry’s orange lights – I see them as a harbinger of doom.
I fished out his manual and waded through page after page dealing with the correct procedure for fitting child seats, and eventually found Display Panel Warning Lights.
It was less than informative – Check the brakes, it said; not comforting for someone who lives in the unflat countryside around Arboleas. Acting upon reliable advice I betook us both to Autofex GoCar on the Arboleas Poligono.
‘Drive it in and we’ll have a look.’ I don’t think Henry heard this – if he had he would have been offended to be referred to as ‘it’. I drove him into the cleanest garage I have ever seen and abandoned him and the dusty evidence of his tyre tracks on the immaculate floor. I left him to the ministrations of a young man with a mask, an air of confidence and a plastic seat cover.
The span of my concentration was now exhausted, so I wandered off to look at a sort of beach buggy – it looked fun, had I been much younger.
My musings were interrupted by the young man.
‘Kiss?’
I looked round. I was the only person in the vicinity. I looked again. There were no parrots with inappropriate vocabulary visible either.
‘Kiss?’
I was nonplussed. The offer must have been made to me – I was the only one there. And I was being propositioned by a dreamboat of a man young enough to be my son’s son.
What should I do? Common decency declared that kissing a complete, if desirable stranger was inappropriate, yet I didn’t want to appear rude, especially as the viability of Henry’s brakes were at stake.
He held up his hand and made a turning motion; comprehension dawned – he had said Keys with a Spanish accent!
I climbed down from Cloud Nine – my predicament resolved and my blushes spared!
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