Home again, home again...
Exactly how much shite can one man buy on eBay? A newsletter to find out...
There’s been a worrying development. Our friend and neighbour John, who has been feeding the cats while we’ve been away, has popped round for a chat.
It seems the beasts have been mostly pretty happy. They have been fed by John. He’s topped up their water. They seemed pleased to see him. The conversation proceeds along these lines, running its natural cause as we exchange pleasantries. It’s only as he’s leaving that he remembers something.
“Oh! I should probably mention before I forget that one of them must have caught something!”
Well this seems unlikely, as they’ve been shut in our SEALED HOUSE for two days. What could it be? Spider, probably. Perhaps a super-bold mouse, if we’re really unlucky.
“Yes,” he went on, “I stuck my head into the living room just to make sure everything was ok in there, and there was a dead bat in the middle of the floor…”
Well hold the fucking phone there John. I take a second to mentally reassess the integrity of my home. WHAT in the ever-living FUCK.
“A BAT? Like, a...BAT bat?”
It appears so.
He takes me back indoors, and shows me the exact spot where he found the deceased bat, slap bang in the middle of the main thoroughfare through the living room. It seems unlikely that we wouldn’t have noticed this, had it been there before we left. Having two children, it’s true that I do step over a lot of shite on the floors – nerf guns, stray socks, the discarded wrappers of whatever snacks my son has put in his tiny face that day – but I’m reasonably confident that I wouldn’t just have walked on by a dead bat on the carpet.
We stand side by side, considering this conundrum. Me in stunned silence. John, probably wondering if I’m genuinely as baffled as I seem or if I’m actually the dark lord himself and this was my shapeshifting cousin. Because, with all the windows and doors shut and locked, how the hell did a bat get in? Did the cats conjure it by pure force of will? It must have been pretty dull at home for two days without us. If you concentrate hard enough, can you manifest a flappy thing to murder? Are there more of them, living in my wardrobe, my office, behind the piano? AM I GOING TO HAVE TO BURN DOWN MY ENTIRE HOUSE NOW?????
I’m recounting this peculiar tale to Lee later that day with breathless incredulity. He seems strangely unperturbed. “Oh yeah”, he says as I finish my raft of theories (one of which is that perhaps Hughie IS actually responsible for coronavirus after all), “Well we’ve had bats in the house before”
Again, WHAT THE FUCK. Not on my watch.
“Yeah! You remember! I told you about this ages ago!!” A repressed memory is beginning to drift to the surface, and yes, I concede I do vaguely remember him telling me something along these lines.
It turned out that one night, Lee had been ‘working late’ - which is what we call it when he sits in the kitchen with a glass of wine, his laptop, and an unquenchable desire to buy shit on the internet. I’d long since gone to bed, and, slightly the wrong side of a very nice bottle of red, he’d stumbled into the lounge to watch a bit of tv. Upon opening the door, he’d seen a solitary bat, flying in circles around the sofa. He did what any reasonable member of society would do, in that he carefully and slowly closed the door, then slapped himself hard in the face. Peering around the door again it transpired that no, he was not hallucinating. There actually was a bat doing loops around the telly. What to do? Who to call? What spell to utter? Is there a division of the council pest control that’s actually for removing flying rodents from your house at 1am? It seemed unlikely.
Probably with memories of this video of an Irish family trying to remove a bat from their kitchen (“GET HIM DERRY!!”) he did what most of us would probably have done in the circumstances, which was to check that the lounge window was open, make sure the door was shut, and then quietly head on upstairs to bed as if nothing had happened. The next day: silence. It was a good few days later when he remembered to mention it to me and the other inhabitants of this, possibly now rabies-infested, house.
So who knows, maybe that bat DID eventually find his way out of the window, or maybe he’s been living under our coffee table enjoying all six seasons of Schitt’s Creek along with me, before meeting a sad demise at the hands of two dementedly bored cats.
I sincerely hope it’s the latter. Now excuse me while I torch everything we own.
ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?
Is this not why you are HERE?
HOLA, hey and bonjour! Life’s been pretty nice these last few weeks , and I’ve got some good stuff for you to enjoy this week, starting with:
This brilliant prank that some wives played on their husbands, buying them all the shame shirt. It’s long, but gets progressively more amusing.
Start your day off right by gazing upon this absolutely definition of phoning it in, a fossil reconstruction known as the Madeburg Unicorn. The longer you look at it, the funnier it gets.
Along those lines, this tweet caught me by surprise but made me laugh a lot.
I discovered another brilliant newsletter this week. Check out The Lucyverse by writer Lucy Sweet. She is hilarious and I like the cut of her jib. Subscribe to it here immediately
I promised I’d tell you about Camp Bestival. It was so jolly I think it might warrant a newsletter all of its own one day, but today’s edited highlight is that we actually WON the Pimp My Trolley competition, which means a full free family ticket to next year! Huzzah! This is worth about £500 I reckon. The theme this year was ‘Desert Island Disco’ and our trolley featured a fully functioning light up dancefloor, laser-lit disco balls, solar-panel powered fridge and phone charger and is built from the bastardised chassis of a mobility scooter. We calculated that with the amount of time Lee has (wasted) spent on it over the years, the winnings equate to a living wage of about 30p an hour. Result! Here she is in all her glory (complete with handmade-mirrorball-helmeted child).
We saw the Cuban Brothers at Camp Bestival, they’re the highlight of the whole thing. Hilarious. It was on their insta account that I discovered this joyful dancing clip, which you definitely need sound on for. It’s brilliant.
Until next time friends, thanks for reading and sharing!
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About me
My brother told me that all the blurb I usually put here is too long and boring, so for brevity, I’m Lindsay Butcher and I write words down for a living. I’ll write for you too if you like.
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Want to read more? Check out previous newsletter editions here, or feast your brain on my blog AndOtherIdiots.
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Absolutely ace trolley! Bats are good though. Anything that eats mosquitoes is a friend in my book!