Another one of those weeks, I’m afraid, with very little to
talk about and no pictures to show for it. The days are getting shorter all the
time and it is becoming easier and easier to sleep through until 8.30 and
beyond in the morning. Not that we were ever early risers, were we?!! Most days
it is quite difficult to decide if the rest of the day is going to be sunny or cloudy
because the windows are more often than not completely fogged up and make the
room even darker. But it is so lovely to be able to snuggle down in a cosy bed
that it is hard to resist. Which could account for the days getting shorter
even if it is only in our minds.
The only thing that really springs to mind about the past
week was an episode that happened on Tuesday night, which I like to call the ‘Curious
noise in the night’. At about 2,30 that night we were both woken by a strange scrabbling
noise on the roof above our bedroom. My initial thought was ‘Oh no! A ‘foine’”
Foine, pronounced foo-ween, is a stone marten, a nasty little rodent that likes
to nest in the attic spaces in houses in the country and reserve one area of
the nest as a midden. I’m not actually sure what they eat but the midden smells
really bad after a relatively short time. We had to deal with this problem once
before in a house that we were looking after, and it was a horrible experience.
Almost immediately, I realised that our house doesn’t have a roof space because
the bedrooms are in the attic. Between the ceiling and the tiles is a thick
layer of various insulating layers with all the tiles blocked at the eaves. So
nothing could possibly get into it, and in any case the roof is three floors up
with no overhanging trees or other handy stepping stones.
After a second or two while we tried to identify the sound,
Neels got up and made sure the windows were all pulled in – just as a
precaution. The scrabbling sound continued for a few more seconds and then
stopped, only to start again after another second or two, but further up the
roof. And then it stopped and we went back to sleep.
In the morning we tried to analyse what we had heard but
could make no sense of anything. It wasn’t a bird sliding down the roof because
there were no sounds of flapping wings, and in any case, the second round of
scrabbling was higher up the roof and not lower down. It also wasn’t a cat as
there is no way up to the roof, and no sound of an animal falling off the roof.
In the end we came to the conclusion that it must have been an owl that had
over-estimated its strength and
picked up something in a nearby field but
had dropped it while flying low over our
roof, turned around and picked it up a second time but dropped it again
immediately. It collected the prey finally on the third attempt and flew off,
flying soundlessly, as owls do.
We have no way of knowing if our interpretation of events is
correct, but it fits and that is good enough for us. The greatest relief was in
realising that nothing can nest in our ceiling space simply because we haven’t
got one!
Schools closed on Friday and we got our part-time tenant
back again for a short time. It is so nice to have some lively music around the
house again and hear someone else moving around apart from ourselves. Schools
re-open again on the 6th November so we have to try and make the
most of the ten days that she will be with us. Hopefully the news will be more
action-packed for those days.
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