A completely gross and disgusting thing happened again involving me and a bat. For those of you that didn’t get to read the first instalment during my vacation in Fiji you can click here for your reading pleasure. But back to the story at hand.
My sister in law came to drop a gift for the newly Miss14 at our house. She made mention that “did I know there was a dead bat on the pavement outside my house?”
No I did not know. It was now only 4pm in the afternoon, the light was fading and The Artist was not due home anytime soon.
I considered my options and decided to be a grownup and go and sort out the problem myself. Bearing in mind that neither neighbour on either side seems to want to be friends with me I am truly alone in the universe in these situations. (And my brother lives way over the harbour bridge and is more of a wus than I would like to be and my father would not in a million years even consider being helpful in these circumstances as dead and sick is not his thing).
Strategically I reckoned one could treat this like those people who scoop the dogs poop with the bags. So I put three bags on my hand and going up my arm and then went outside to confront the problem. I was going to pick it up with my plastic-bagged hand, turn the bag inside out with the other hand and then close it up and chuck it in the bin. The Council were collecting early the next morning – before you get all ughhhh, grossssssss, a dead bat in your binnnnn.
However, this thing was the size of a well fed house cat. Freaking enormous I tell you. Enormous. And it looked like it was taking a good old-fashioned nap there on the grass under the tree. In no universe (alone or not) was my hand, three plastic bags over it going to come into contact with some so big and so dead.
I returned to the house to re-strategise.
Plan B involved a spade and the three bags, now dangling from my other hand. This was not an easy thing people. The wind was blowing. And that bat was heavy. Heavier than it looked and the spade got tangled under the bat and , the deal breaker, it stank like you can’t believe!!!!
I eventually managed to get it in to the bag and had Miss10 get one of those nice smelling lemon scented bin bags to seal the stinking bat in as he went to his final resting place in the rubbish.
Did I mention that I was quietly keening and flapping inside to myself, such was my distress?
A few hours later, when The Artist returned from his office, I was all pumped up to tell him of my brave brave disposal of the bat and got to the part when his sister was telling me there was a dead bat outside the house when he interrupted to tell me that yes, he and Miss14 had seen it the weekend before.
The world got suddenly quiet as I considered going to get the bat out of the bin to smack him in the head with it.
Yes people. They had taken a walk the weekend before and seen the bat outside the house. Dead. The Artist remarked that it was beautifully intact and very well fed. He reckoned it’s legs couldn’t hold its fat little body and that it fallen out of the tree, onto its head, cracked it’s skull and died. Just like that. He also reckoned that it was perfectly okay for him to leave it there, to rot outside my house. He thought perhaps a dog would pick it up. And do what with it exactly?
Miss10 then pointed out that she had noticed that it’s feet were fried so no, it had not just dropped out of the sky from a tree whilst resting it’s fat little body – it had died by electrocution on the powerlines. It gets worse and worse.
Now I know that this will probably not make sense at all, but it was one thing for me to dispose of a freshly dead bat, it was another thing entirely for me to have to dispose of a bat that had been dead for almost a week, had been electrocuted and was decomposing etcetera etcetera. I mean seriously, imagine if it had broken in half or something as I was wrestling it into the bag with the spade. I would have needed therapy for at least six months. At least.
The Artist also wanted to know why I didn’t take any photos of the dead bat and me disposing of it…….
Some people are just so insensitive, don’t you think?
Love and light
Lauren xxx
