For various less than enlightening reasons that are probably even too tedious for me to feel them worthy of mention here, I spend rather a lot of my time in close proximity to a certain keyboard that is, more often than not, fairly close to the eaves at the very top of my tiny little hovel, and recently I’ve started to notice, or rather hear, a rather strange phenomenon occurring.
Sometimes as my day naturally unfolds itself, as days in all honesty usually will, I will pause for a moment or two in order to try and grab hold of a passing thought or idea and attempt, however unsuccessfully, to get my creative juices flowing and, over the course of the last few weeks, during that pause for thought, I will hear a slight and barely audible fluttering sound.
At first I thought it sounded vaguely mechanical and I just put it down to being a side effect of the position that the processor unit was placed in, a sort of electronic resonance or Doppler feedback being interpreted rather weirdly by my aging eardrums as a kind of sparodic tinnitus, and, as with many other matters health-related, I just tried to ignore it and carry on. Then, one evening, I went upstairs to sort out a few tedious fiscal matters and, with my pen poised over the chequebook ready and waiting to sign over yet more of my dwindling finances over to person or persons unknown, and all electronic devices firmly and significantly switched off, I heard the fluttering sound again.
My roof, it would seem, has a heartbeat.
Now there are a number of things that might have caused this to happen, and some of them are less than wonderful things for a battered and rather neglected old building to have inflicted upon it. Being me, my mind immediately flew to the places within marked “worst case scenario” and my personal panic button was well and truly pressed.
Immediately I launched the now innocent and fully vindicated aging computing device and trawled through the various search engines because the dreaded words “Death Watch Beetle” hove into my mind, but some swift investigations (it truly amazes me sometimes what you can find on the internet and how quickly you can find it) had me reassured that their particular noise bore no relation to the one I was hearing. This was no death rattle I was hearing, more of a soft chirrup.
Then, as is the nature of coincidence, a news item turned up on television shortly afterwards about the horrors associated with grey squirrel infestations in the roofs of old houses and my panic button was struck again, with me quickly trying to work out where most of the less-than-extensive electric wiring in my little old house lay. Having calmed my fears a tad, I sat down to think about it all rationally (or as close as I ever get…), and happily, getting up and making a few visual investigations pretty much convinced me that there are no feasible access points to make them darned squirrels a likely possibility as chief suspect. Granted I do hear harsher scratchier sounds throughout my days, but that is from the feet of the ever-vigilant Jackdaws that survey the landscape from my rooftop for much of the daytime.
Then of course, buzzing as it now was from the use of some of its more neglected quadrants, my tiny brain summoned up a memory which immediately explained rather a lot. Many, many years ago, shortly after I, as a slightly lonely and isolated figure, had moved in to this tiny shack that I’m more often than not convinced that nobody in their right mind would have bought, I sat all alone on a warm summer’s evening watching a bit of television with the curtains open. Suddenly a small group of my as-yet unknown neighbours started to group around my front window and make conversation with each other.
“Strange”, I thought, and immediately my mind was filled with images of villagers in old horror movies bearing their burning torches with a view towards despatching the unknown outsider. I’d already heard tell of mobs in certain towns taking it upon themselves to attack the homes of individuals due to some sort of linguistic misunderstanding and I feverishly began to wrack my brains for any slights that I might have inadvertently committed over recent days that might cause such a response. An ill-advised choice of parking spot perhaps, or one of my surly glances mistaken for something more vindictive, but I could think of nothing. Why then had my hitherto anonymous neighbours started to gather upon my doorstep?
Well, I ventured out and found out that it was bats that were bringing them together. I had bats in my, well, not exactly my belfry, but certainly in my roof space. Those people had been watching them fly out of the tiny gaps where the mortar had crumbled away. Happily they recounted to me about how they had counted at least seventy of the little darlings launching themselves out into the gathering darkness of that warm summer’s evening.
Generally I recall this moment as being the first time I genuinely spoke to some of my neighbours and the start of a slightly worrying time for me as the roof space was less than fully sealed in those days and I had visions of heading upstairs in the darkness and finding myself in something resembling a cavern much like those seen in David Attenborough’s TV programmes. Despite much reassurance that they would do no harm and that they would probably depart eventually to other places, possibly leaving me with a roof space cleared of any insect-based infestations, I still managed to find many reasons to fret and worry about their presence.
Now, it seems that there was very little I could actually do about this situation anyway because bats are actually rather adorable and, of course, a very protected species. They are also, so I’ve been reliably assured, fairly harmless when it comes to the fabric of my rickety abode and may very well do more good than harm as they will munch away upon any of those pesky insects that they might come across which presumably would include any of the woodworm that would otherwise be chewing upon my roof beams unmolested.
Anyway, it would appear that this year the bats are back, assuming that they ever actually went away, and it’s also possible that they’ve been regular visitors over the years even though this is the first time I’ve been in such close proximity to them as I now spend so much of my time mere inches away from them on the other side of the plaster. Of course their ‘protected’ status probably means that some of the overdue roofwork that I keep putting off having to be dealt with will have to be postponed yet again, which is probably not a good thing.
On the plus side, however, I can hear my roof softly breathing and, on the whole, it’s rather comforting, if just a little bit batty.
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