What can I say? Too much exposure to Morris Dancing at the Warwick Folk Festival led me to make an unwise purchase on eBay....

So I've got until spring next year to get a tune out of the damn thing...I like those odds.

I woke up again to the soft jingle of morris bells and handkerchief folding, only today our neighbours were all packing up, it seemed they all needed to move on immediately after their gig today - its a hard life on the road as a Morris Dancer it seems.

My mate had an agenda today, he wanted to see some 'proper' Morris dancing in town and 'The Spooky Mens' Chorale' in the main tent in the evening. I had no serious opinions either way as long as I didn't have to watch 'Al Fresco' again and so was happy to be led. That said, once the Morris-off kicked off in the street that day I did start to feel a bit nervous, it all felt a bit 'hard core' what with dancers Morrising all over the place, and other dancers standing around with pints appraising each others stick/handkerchief manipulation, footwork and bell deployment. Standing as I was in the crowd listening to them all, I felt somewhat out of my depth. Happily though, after about an hour in the sun and two pints later I relaxed into it, and at least it was more jolly than all that 'plough girl lost her maidhead to a gypsy lad' stuff from yesterday.

One of my particular favourites was Plum Jerkum. After a whole bunch of people in prissy white smocks, these characters came on in jeans with black faces, quite jolly from beer, and they growled and snarled as they danced. They wielded their sticks like they really were trying to belt one another, and ran howling into the crowd after their jig, scaring all the kids. They were great.

My second favourite was Gog Magog - they looked like a bunch of Cambridge students and I loved their stylised form of dance with clenched fists and strange poses like the Silly Walks from Monty Python. Their colour scheme was quite inspired too.

(also see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDkVBaTHHww, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-d_-tDC11I, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRaIDFE-ZCc)

The rest kinda blended into one really. Some had handkerchiefs, some had sticks...some blacked their faces, some wore poofy hats. Bells seemed obligatory.

  

By the end of it all, my head was swimming with jigs and reels and mollys and thankfully, it all got nicely broken up with a street play, about Hannibal and including a very silly Elephant that got all the applause.

There was also a highly professional outfit that clearly did the rounds at other festivals, displays and what not. We'd seen them rehearsing outside on the street while we were getting our full english breakfast in a nearby cafe that morning. They were doing a complicated looking thing with flags, and the main guy was also rehearsing some difficult stunt with a broom, which he later did for the crowd warning them that this was the first time it had been performed in public (and unfortunately he did make a little cock-up too). I YouTubed it!

Broom dance

Clay pipe dance

Back at the Main festival site after all the morris dancers had dissipated, we got ourselves some nice thick soupy real ale and parked ourselves on empty barrels outside the beer tent, listening to Keith Donnelly again on the main stage. Kudos to him, he came up with another good set and really got the crowd going for the rest of the night. I'm not sure he's work very well as a recorded artist, but I'll definately consider it a perk if I ever seem him at any other festivals in the future. This time, he was hitting melons with baseball bats into the crowd and getting kids to come up to the front to tell jokes...very good fun.

Anyhoo....the Spooky Men Chorale (http://www.spookymen.com.au/) what can I say? I was completely blown away. They were the most inspired thing I've seen since I found out about The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvCFIposH_g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Tv1s_50jwY

Wow! I rushed straight to the CD tent after their bit and bought all their CD's. They are going right there next to my 'Pat Boone in a Metal Mood' and A Cappella verions of 'The Who Sell Out Tour' (samples of either available on request)

The african style band thing after the Spooky Men didn't really cut it so we went to the chips tent and bought...er...chips, then sat on some crates in the light rain eating and drinking ale. We heard them again later in the beer tent, possibly holding an impromtu singing workshop with all the drunks, but it had all broken up by the time we got over there to investigate. And as I took a shower, I was treated to a lone female guitarist practising in the nice echoy changing rooms singing lovely melancoly melodies - it was really nice.

So...Warwick Folk Festival. Final prognosis? Surprisingly good fun actually and if I ever thought Cropredy was chilled out, this place is so laid back its practically falling over. Would I ever willingly watch 5 hours of morris dancing or listen to 3 hours of medieval ballads though...? Hmmm we'll have to see....

Laying on my campbed that morning, it slowly became apparent who our neighbours were.....Morris Dancers, hundreds of them! (ok I exaggerate slightly - but a least two troups worth which could easily be >30 of them). You could hear them wandering around getting themselves ready - the soft pad of ankle bells and gentle clunk of sticks. Discussions about the flower arrangements in their hats or the state of their handkerchiefs. The light drone of a newly warmed up accordian.

It was quite calming actually. I do not feel threatened by Morris Dancers - I am tolerant of all minority groups, even radical and extreme ones like theirs. And we even got an impromtu performance of 'Music for a Found Harmonium' (originally by the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, as featured in the closing scenes of the film 'Napoleon Dynamite') which was absolutely lovely to listen to while sitting in the sun digesting a breakfast burger and a cup of Yogi[tm] tea (all auras cleansed or your money back).

Eventually all the Morris Dancers clopped off in their wooden clogs, jingling, and we thought we may as well make a move ourselves. Staring frustratedly at the events schedule, we eventually worked out that if we visited any of the pubs in town for an early doors drink we'd be at high risk of running into 'Al Fresco' again and we didn't want that. There was a venue in a hotel though, that was featuring some people with quite interesting billings as well as 'floor spots' aka time allocated for average joes to walk off the street and do a skit like Mysterious Dave did the other night with his fireman song. That would probably be quite fun.

So we marched off into town with the sun pleasingly intense and no threat of rain. We went via a nice little street market full of the usual craft tat and a model shop. Here, I ogled Play Mobil - a flavour of toy I was obsessed with when I was a kid, and just like Lego, appears to have ballooned from the rather primitive toy set I was familiar with into a complex set of play themes with amazing huge expensive objects I could only have dreamed of like whole airoplanes you can fit dolls into or posable horses or electric railways and light up space ships. In my day, you painted a rock or a heap of dirt and made do with that....shish kids today!

We got accosted by our first group of Morris Dancers on the way to a pasty shop. It was more like a Morris-off. It seemed that three rival Morris Troups were taking it in turns to do dances and see who got the most applause. As they had rendered the street unnavigable, and we suspected one of the troups was a neighbour of ours, we stood around and watched for a bit to see which Morris Troup had the most pizzaz.

  

The orange and red ones were the ones near us, and possibly the purple and green ones too. Couldn't say about the red and black ones, though the camp site was full of 'em when you really looked.

The Morris-off broke up after a couple of turns from each troup and with no clear winner, but luckily no violence or knives, broken bottles or street fighting. You can never tell with Morris dancers though, they are a combustible lot. A hotbed of repressed violence.

Dazed and confused from a half hour of morris, we stumbled to the main square only to be confronted with another bemusing sight - a portable belfy.

What will they think of next? If you can't bring people to the belfry, bring the belfry to the people. I think its an excellent idea - I work closely with someone who is a bellringing and I must admit I'm curious about the mechanics of it. Obviously I've had said person explain and it becomes rapidly apparent there are Technicalities that you only grasp when you have completely immersed yourself in the subject. To a gizmo freak like me, that alone makes the subject tantilising and elusive. I stood for a while watching untutored people pull the bells, remembering what I had been told about how experienced people control rhythm and some of the standard patterns that people practise. You'd think there is no place in the modern world for bell ringing but people forget about weddings, and if you're a half competant bell ringer you are always guaranteed 'gigs' at various churches around the district - think about it. No screaming groupies, but a steady flow of work over summer months none the less - and think about how a tolling bell lends atmosphere to any village scene? I was almost tempted to step forward and give it a go, but a bit like billiards and skiing - it'll never happen because if I can't practise something in private on my own in the early days then I'll never do it at all. Shame though.

The hotel we intended to go to for the first performances of the day was mislocated according to the map in the program, but we found it using cunning and gile. It was quite a strange experience. For a start, it was set in an elegant drawing room of an old Victorian-esque hotel. The chairs were all high backed gold filligree and laid out in oppressive rows facing a couple of chairs, just off from a small bar. The whole room was utterly formal with picture rails and french windows, all got out for a string quartet recital. It felt a bit strange being a slightly stinking hippie in canary yellow jeans and pink t-shirt in these circumstances.

The entire afternoon was being hosted by a someone who was clearly part steward, part compaire, part musician. She opened with a few numbers herself on the guitar though clearly her remit was that if anyone else wanted a go, she must step down (in the initial stages, no-one did). The first act up was a fiddle and guitar twosome of recently post university age (Gren Bartely/Tom Kitching) and they were very good, then we got a 'floor spot' from 'June and Dave' - June was a bit average but Dave's song about Big Brother was great fun and you could see he had some talent. A young lass and her mother followed next (Elizabeth Hearn) and it was fun watching a teenager blushingly singing dodgy songs medieval songs about women who'd married old men who couldn't get it up and had to shag the gardener, or innocent maids who'd unwittingly lost their maidenheads to handsome ploughboys. A break-loose morris dancer was next with a recital of a long poem which was fun, though he did forget his words on a couple of occassions through nerves and the whole audience cringed in sympathy of him.

The compaire did another couple of 'finger in the ear' style ballads after the morris dancer, and by the time Danansooz came on (not an exotic name, simply a conjunction of Dan and Sue) I was at the point where if I heard on more 'lass loses maidenhead to a fine gent on a bright steed' style ballad I was going to scream. We cut loose shortly after.

We emerged, blinking, from the dark of the hotel into the burning sunshine and was stalked by a morris dancer (marching determinedly behind in clogs and bells) back to the camp site. Here, we had a cheap burger and then tried the Main Tent venue out for size - listening to the impossibly named 'Maire ni Chathasiagh & Chris Newman' (harp virtuoso and excellent guitar player - really good)  followed by a dull brother and sister combi, a dull 'Statesmen of Prog Rock' type routine from a grey haired guy in jeans and dark sun glasses, then Altan - who in these sort of circumstances was the folk equivelant of the Rolling Stones and had all the folkies throwing their cardigans on stage and screaming.

I wasn't too impressed with Altan sans mixing desk and my mate was nodding of from a couple of pints of the finest ale obtained from the beer tent so we sloped off back to our tents a couple of songs before the encore. I didn't mind, I'd had a good day out in the sun and had finally got a feeling for the rhythm of the place. No crowds and no queues meant you could stroll through the whole day, untroubled with desperate needs to see a particular person or obtain a particular foodstuff. Day was best spent in town, evening best spent at the main site loitering round the beer tent on the fringes of the main stage. Whatever time of the day or night you were guaranteed a shower or a pee with no queues and no risk of lack of toilet paper - it was actually quite nice.

That night in bed in my tent I finished the final Harry Potter and was armed and ready for movie spoilers. The only way I could describe the ending to my mate was 'Adequate'.

 

Now I know I’ve done ‘folk’ festivals before, but today we journeyed over to the most folky folk festival we'd ever tackled to date. This was to be Warwick folk festival, a festival that has been on the go harumpty-coff years now and is one of the most respected in the land (or so the flyers for it told us).

 

The hard core beardy-wierdy element held no fear for me to be honest. No, the element that was giving me the most foreboding was the recent floods, especially those all over Gloucestershire and Warwickshire. I was driving and I had visions of endless tailbacks on motorways because lanes were under water, coasting through foot high puddles, and getting my mate to push the car out of banks of mud. And that was even before we got to our camp site and discovered it flooded, and then had to face three days of morris dancing standing up to our knees in mud in the driving rain. I really wasn’t getting that warm fluffy feeling about any of it, and it was my mate who largely managed to summon the sufficient optimism for both of us to make me to give it a go.

 

As it was, the Warwick is only a short painless drive from Manchester (including traditional coffee and voiding stop at Norton Caines service station). Our destination, we were assured, was ‘well drained’ and all the weather report sites told us Warwick was going to have a big fluffy cloud over it with a smile sun peeking from just behind.

 

When we got there however, a bit early, we got turned away from the camp site. The reason was a mysterious one (‘Oh the school won’t let us use the field yet’ – we were camping on the grounds of a large private school) and the guy at the gates told us to go park somewhere in town for a bit and come back in a couple of hours when we might be let on to camp finally.

 

I continued to interpret everything as an omen of disaster, hypothesising that the field was under water and they were trying to find other places for us to camp…that they wouldn’t let us park near the tents and we’d have to walk miles lugging all our stuff…that I’d have to leave the car for three days in a £1 per hour town car park and run up a vast bill etc etc etc. My mate told me to shut up and aim for the castle where theoretically we could hang out for a while to kill time. After an extremely circuitous route, a bit of queuing and a silly amount of walking from the overspill car park to the castle’s main gates we discovered the entrance fee was £18 to get in. At that point we gave up, and walked all the way back to the school again where the festival was to see if it was letting cars in yet. It was...and we didn't have the car with us…so we marched all the way back to the castle carpark to get the car and finally camped up several exhausting hours after we first arrived.

 

At least it wasn’t raining though.

 

Once we’d camped, we started to feel a bit more settled, as is usually the case. We’d pitched up next to a large cordoned off area which we were told by one fella was reserved for a large party and this was a bit worrying… for instance would it be a coach load of unruly children all running around at night screaming and tripping over things? Or a coach load of unruly pensioners, all doing the same? There was nothing we could do about this now though and time would tell.

 

Consulting our site map, the first evidence of flood adjustments became apparent. Where the map said there would be toilets there often wasn’t – perhaps because the intended area was a bit boggy. Certain bits of campsite labeled for tents were roped off and pools of glistening water were evident everywhere you looked. Our patch was ok though. The ground seemed firm underfoot, and we were within strolling distance of the school swimming pool/cricket pavilion via a concrete path that spanned the boggy areas like a bridge. Said buildings were going to be open to the folkies over the weekend which meant access to toilets and shower/changing room, and certain times even a ‘folk wash’ (i.e. a free go in the pool).

 

Once we had got our bearings, we had an amble round the school grounds to scope out the rest of what was available to us. We found a tiny food area (x1 chips and burger stall, x1 baked potato stall, x1 Caribbean stall) where we fortified ourselves with chilli covered baked spuds and a side order of wasp. We found the half finished main arena tent, and the patch of ground where the beer tent was likely to be. Then we found the couple of small arts theatres nearby where some of the artists would be playing later…and finally found the main road which we had already drove up and down two times and walked up and down four times, but seemed the only option left for a bit of entertainment.

 

Girding ourselves, we returned on foot to town intent on sampling the many bands that were meant to be playing in pubs dotted around the place. The first place we stopped at for a pint didn’t have anyone playing or any beer to my taste, but had a nice uncluttered beer garden under a very loud church tower that chimed every hour, and it gave us time to stare at the uncomprehensible events program and try to get some sort of sense out of it. After two pints of study, we located somewhere nearby that was a venue and popped our heads in there. It had empty seats and nice lager in appropriate glasses so we settled, and soon we were joined by a couple of guys called ‘Al Fresco’ playing at the front of the bar.

 

Here is a blurry photograph of one of them. The guy to the right with his head in his hands adequately expresses my own personal opinion of them.

 

 

Luckily the lager was going down nicely and someone had left a 'Warwickshire Life' on the table for me to read. Also, the performance was spiced up halfway through by some random guy who came out of nowhere and led an unaccompanied sing-a-long about drunk firemen, then disappeared off into the night again. He was great, I could have listened to more of him. Unfortunately we got 'Al Fresco' back on again instead.

 

Once the band had wrapped up, we decided to head back to the main festival site and see if we can see a few bands at some of the other venues. Via luck and Brownian motion, we found ourselves at The Bridge House Theatre, a small Arts venue near the school, and there we settled down to Keith Donnelly, someone we'd not heard of before but was clearly legendary in the folk circles as a complete nutcase (in a similar mould to Billy Connelly only Geordie and more whimsical with less swearing). At the beginning of his skit, he kept trying to play a song but then wandered off on lots of funny psuedo-philosphical tangents...he'd keep remembering himself and strumming the guitar again a couple of times, then he'd remember another good joke and off he'd go again on another nutty ramble. In the end it took him about 10-15 to finally get round to his first song, at which point he revealed he was actually a very good guitarist, but then he drifted into another excited monologue and we'd all be rolling in the aisles laughing at him once more. Happily, he was on again over the course of the weekend and compairing too, so we made it our business to see him again.

 

We could have tried to catch the last act at the main tent but we were both knackered and it was pretty crowded so we went back to our tents instead (via a plate of chips). Our neighbours had arrived, and seemed quiet and well behaved. I had erected the tent with every single peg and guy rope I possessed because it was a bit breezey and the frame was swaying alarmingly - all was still pinned firmly to the ground. And the couple who we'd left a while back battling half heartedly with a gazebo had moved elsewhere (or perhaps given up in desperation and gone home). All was quiet, all was well.

 

All disturbingly peaceful though...where was the raucous drunks and filth and litter and crowding...? This was a folk festival alright, but not as we know it. Very strange...very strange. Maybe we'd get more into the rhythm tomorrow. Until then....sleep.

 

(after someone at work has just asked a favour of me)

"[and] I smell wonderful and am free from stain"

It wasn't quite the fanfare I had hoped for, but Diggory has finally left the roost. I'd still not found any evidence that he was flying to date, but I left the greenhouse window open last night and today Diggs isn't in his roost and doesn't appear to be anywhere else in the Greenhouse according to the bat detector. Oh well. I'd kinda hoped I could have launched him into the wide open off my fingertips, and I'm going to be frantically scanning the night sky now looking for him hoping a cat didn't get him on his virgin flight but...it's for the best really which ever way he went.

Fare thee well Little Squeaking Beast, I'm going to miss you very much.

....I'm now going to enter a small period of mourning.....

"I remember once imagining what my life would be like, what I'd be like. I pictured having all these qualities, strong positive qualities that people could pick up on from across the room. But as time passed, few ever became any qualities that I actually had. And all the possibilities I faced and the sorts of people I could be, all of them got reduced every year to fewer and fewer. Until finally they got reduced to one, to who I am. And that's who I am"

Dave Sprintz from 'The Weather Man'.

Ingredients:
Une tin de Sheba tender chicken pieces
Une bottle de Whiskas kitten milk
Une tub des meal worms

Equipment:
Tweazers, scissors, a small stick

Preparation:

Taking a very small shallow dish (such as the lid off a film cannister), first spoon in approximately a gram of Sheba chicken pieces using your stick. Again using your stick (or a nice clean finger), lay these pieces out artistically around the dish. Then, carefully pour up to 5ml of Whiskas kitten milk over the chicken pieces until the dish is nearly filled.

Finally, open the tub of mealworms. Pick out one worm with your tweazers and hold it firmly close to the head. Then, taking your scissors, briskly snip the head off your mealworm, discarding this in a separate dish but cutting the rest of the (still twitching) body into short 5mm pieces. Repeat this process for up to 4 mealworms (attempting not to retch), then sprinkle the mealworm pieces over the chicken and the milk as a garnish. Serve with a dampened sponge.

It may even have been his first flight, which is what I hoped I would witness.

Basically...he'd had a miserable night last night. It was reasonably chilly and he'd got used to central heating, so when I checked him first thing this morning he was cold and sluggish and antisocial. He'd also not eaten any food.

I spent the day thinking of a solution and resolved that the following night, I'd put a heater in the greenhouse to keep the temperature up (and it looked like, thankfully, the greenhouse had warmed up enough during the day anyway to wake him up enough to take some food, because bits of meal worm were scattered liberally about when I came home).

I installed the oil powered heater in the greenhouse after I'd had my tea, and left it for a few hours to really gain temperature. Then just before bed (and after a half hour or so of watching his wild 52khz friend hunting outside) I went back to check how it was doing. By this time, the greenhouse was about blood temperature and Diggory was extremely friendly again and willing to squeak hello. He was hyperactively clambering about all over the place so I dangled some cloth around that he could climb on, then blow me, then next thing I knew he climbed to the highest point and flapped his wings and...then he was sitting on the top of the green house doors squeaking at me.

I stood stock still, wondering what he would do next. After a thorough squeak he launched off again, brushing my cheek with a wing as he skimmed past me, then piled headfirst into a large plant at which point he lost all the style points he'd accrued earlier. He forced me to bail him out, first encouraging him onto my jumper and then onto Glove (aka 'Mom') from where I could put him delicately back in his roost with most of his ego still intact.

As soon as Glove had returned him to the entrance of his little bat cave he took a few gobfuls of milk, clambered gratefully back into his safe little hidey hole, then returned to sulk mode (something I am becoming accustomed to). It was a great moment though, and my only worry now (as it always was) was if he has another attack at flying tonight and can't get back to his roost, and I have to try and locate him in some wierd and wonderful cubby hole in the greenhouse tomorrow in order to get him back to his food source.

This is where the bat detector comes it. I'm really hoping I know how to work the begger though else otherwise, Diggory is going to be more or less impossible to locate. Unless of course he becomes smart enough to return to his roost in a single night but....lets remember how he and I first met one another....

So exciting though! It's a shame he's bald, else I'd probably consider releasing him in the next day or so. He should at least grow hair before his first official outing...

I had to look after a work colleagues farm. Said work colleague doesn't really have a farm, but in my dream it was rolling acres of lovely green grass down a gentle slope, with a large red brick farmhouse covered in climbing roses. He was going on holiday, and he asked me to look after his animals for a bit. He had six sheep that needed letting out in the morning, and driving into a pen in the middle of the field at night. He also had some chickens which also needed letting out in the day, though when he was walking me around his farm explaining everything, I remember he told me I had to remember to put the cockatiels in at night, when I think he meant cockrels.

So he went off on his holiday and left me in charge. That first evening, I found I could easily round up the sheep just by leading them one by one. I laid my hand on its wooly back, and then guide it by pressing it against my leg and gently stopping it from straying side to side with my hand. The cockrels were equally as pliant.

The next day however, when it came to rounding up the sheep I found one sheep was dead, it looked like it had caught itself in a fence and wound the wire round its neck in its struggles to get free, and then had choked itself. Next to it was a tiny baby lamb, orphaned, and when I picked it up it felt slick and soft like warm liver, it was very strange. I carried the lamb over to the pen where the other 5 sheep had been led, and tucked it in next to the pen in the fold of a pile of my clothes that for some reason were all stacked up around the edge of the pen. Then I went into the farm house and wondered what to do. Inside, there was a huge loaf of unsliced bread and I got distracted and vaguely wondered about whether or not it would be stale by the time my work colleague got back. Then I considered hand rearing the lamb and started looking round all the shelves.

I was all for starting improvising hand rearing this lamb and went back out into the field, and there I sort my work colleague wandering around in barbar jacket and tartan hat - very upper class hunting gear - in a group with some others carrying guns and idly surveying the landscape. And then I woke up.

 

- Of course its pretty obvious where the core subject matter of that particular dream came from isn't it? I'm looking after a friends garden at the moment while she is away and I'm likely looking after some other plants during a coming weekend. The hand rearing is all Diggory's fault. The sheep, cockrels/cockatiels and the sheep death I *think* was my brain associated the bat handrearing scenario first with baby lambs, then with my Mum's mate back in the Isle of Man who has a mini farmstead with chickens and sheep (and lambs, which she hands over to make into meat periodically). Not quite sure why I chose the particular work colleague I did to own the farm metaphor but it was an unlikely choice, apart from the fact I know he lives in Wales and the hillside was very Welsh.

At least it wasn't raining.

I've just spent some quality time with the other creatures I'm currently residing with - namely the mealworms who are destined to be beheaded and spoonfed to my bat, the forgotten 'pets' .

You generally get them in a little tub from a pet shop. Said tub is filled with bran and a handful of mealworms, with a layer of tissue on top to keep things moist. It's basically self maintaining up to a point, but the mealworms are always excreting as they are crawling through the bran, and some of them are pupating and turning into beetles as they get older, and over time the tub of bran turns into an acrid smelling mush full of horrible white twitching things and the odd beetle. If left even longer, it would just become a bunch of beetles crawling over mounds of shit and rotting remains eating one another - a kinda post apocalyptic nightmare on a minature scale. 

This was what my tub of mealworms had nearly degenerated into, so today I finally had to face the mess and clean it up. This required picking out each mealworm that was still a mealworm and putting them aside, chucking all the beetles and pupae into a plastic bag and scooping out all the nasty smelling old feed on top of them, then wrapping all the mess in another plastic bag and hoping the beetles didn't figure a way out of the wheely bin before the bin men came. It was yucky, though as with every yucky task, the clean and fresh feeling afterwards of a well scrubbed tub of mealworms was worth every second of unpleasantness.

As a back up - I still have a tin of meaty chicken chunks cat food for days when I just can't face chopping mealworms into little chunks.

On a lighter note....here's a vampire bat on a treadmill...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdlhouEJLNY&mode=related&search=bats

I now have reliable evidence that Diggory is eating little bits of meal worm. Digusting for me, but good news for him. He takes bits back to his roost and sucks the insides out - bleugh. Also, he can now execute an elegant glide from my finger tip to a target 5 inches away and downwards. Okay it isn't much, but it's a step up from a crash landing and falling flat on his face. At an estimated age of 4 and a half weeks, that puts him right on target developmentally. I've got to get him rehabilitated in the next two weeks though, as I've got another festival. Either that, or some lucky soul somewhere is going to be babysitting a bat for a weekend...

"It's Day 26 in the Big Brother Bat House

Yesterday, Big Brother told Diggory that he could no longer live in the Big Brother house, because he was getting fat and lazy and needed to start behaving like a proper bat. Today, Elly was given the task of moving all Diggory's things to the Greenhouse. Once there, Diggory will have to start learning to fly and eat mealworms. He will not be permitted to go back in the main house, but the rest of the house mates will be allowed to visit him. Diggory and Elly are in the Greenhouse, talking..."

Okay okay, no more. But it is true, it is now 26 Days since mine and Diggory's lives collided, and I have moved the Little Squeaking Beast into the greenhouse. I did this cheifly because he's starting to smell a bit pungent. Also, I want my living room back so I can play loud films on my cinema system again without worrying about upsetting the bat.

The whole smell thing though...this, coupled with the revelation the other day that my bat seems to have a higher voice than your average pipistrelle, is all pointing again to the fact that my bat might actually be a soprano pipistrelle rather than a regular common pipistrelle. The problem is, these two species are notoriously difficult to tell apart. To illustrate, I'll quote from a scientific journal I found:-

"The two species are very similar in morphology, but recently several characters have been established that allow determination without molecular analysis. First, of course, the name-giving difference in the end-frequency of the echolocation calls can be used in the field (pipistrelle: 40-50 kHz; soprano pipistrelle: 50-60 kHz) when the sound is recorded during release. [EJ: And I'm sure now that Diggory plus the bats outside are definately more in the 50-60kHz range] In addition, a growing number of morphological characters have been found that can be used for separation of the species when an animal is held in the hand, even if not all of them are without overlap: Wing membranes, forearm and face are much darker, almost blackish in the pipistrelle, and brown in the soprano pipistrelle. [EJ: Well that's all very well if you have a couple of bats side by side to compare, mate, but I don't have that luxury] In the latter the ears always have a pale inner base. The face of the soprano pipistrelle is shorter and the forehead steeper. Unmistakable is the colour of the penis of the adult male in the two species: [EJ:  Now hang on a minute. It was hard enough to figure out that Diggory was indeed a Diggory and not a Doris back in the early days when he was young and pliable. You're not seriously asking me to try and get at his penis again now he's old and stroppy...?] the penis of the pipistrelle is grey with a slightly paler stripe in the middle; [EJ: Oh god, you really do want me to look at his penis...] the penis of the soprano pipistrelle is whitish-yellow and the base is sometimes orange [EJ: Sorry, Diggory has politely declined permission for me to use this form of identification, any other suggestions?]. Adult soprano pipistrelles have a characteristic odour resembling the smell of a noctule male [EJ: Great! And what does a noctule bat smell like then?]. Pipistrelles lack this odour. We suggest a new, promising character using the "wing venation", the pattern of the elastic fibers in the wing between the forearm and the fifth finger, a character, that had already been used for the determination of other species in the genus Pipistrellus by Vierhaus(1996): In the pipistrelle bat there is normally one "cell" between the elbow and the end of the fifth metacarpal without a crossing piece of elastic fibre; in most (> 90 %) of the soprano pipistrelles which we have examined there is a second cell without a crossing vein, and a very characteristic small "tree" of veins is visible between these two cells. [EJ: (pauses to read last portion a couple of times) Okay I think I er... (rereads it again) Nope...nope I'm sorry I don't understand that. What do you mean by 'finger' in the context of a bat? What do you mean by cell? What's the fifth metacarpal? Oh...bluddy hell. ]

I'm going to have to try and work this out though because sopranos are a lot rarer than common pipistrelles and if mine is a soprano, a bat protection service needs to know about my local colony as I suspect the old building they are living in is due to be sold off and knocked down soon. I reckon it'll all be a lot easier when Diggory gets his adult fur (he's still bald at the moment) as sopranos have a relatively distinctive light orange brown and commons are a lot darker. Until then though, the mystery remains. Rare or not, he smells so into the greenhouse he goes. I've moved his old roost as-is (with him still in it, asleep) so theoretically he shouldn't be too traumatised, he'll simply wake up, have a quick ecolocate, and realise that his residence has somehow magically got 5 times bigger. He even gets to keep his heated mat for the night time, and knowing me I'll probably be over there at supper with a hot water bottle and a nice hot drink. This bat is never gonna leave me is it? Never.

Ah har. I've got to the root of the 'My bat detector doesn't work' problem - it was tuned wrong. I was tuned to 45khz because that was what I was told a Pipistrelle squeaks at. Tonight however (the first night for ages where it hasn't rained) I went out in the garden and wiggled the dial around, and finally got a bunch of squeaks at over 50khz. I spent half an hour watching a bat wheel around hunting whilst drinking coffee, then went back inside and pointed the detector at my bat and sure enough, it was squeaking at the same frequency.

Now I have to work out whether I just have a common pipistrelle with a very high voice, or a soprano pipistrelle with a very low one. Work ongoing. 

Incidentally 'Pipistrelle' is Latin for 'little squeaking beast'. Nice.

Okay okay, I know. It's nothing to be ashamed of, it can happen to anyone. I'm trying not to make my bat paranoid about it.

Initially fearful that it might be some sort of fatal bat mange or scrofula, I did another google search and I *think* my bat is simply shedding its baby fur and growing its adult coat. It's still a troubling sight though, after all this time and effort I have invested in keeping the little begger alive.

Anyone know a good wig maker for bats..? Or perhaps we can cover it up with a little bat comb-over and a nice toupee...

Who invented ironing and why? Who decided, arbitarily, that straight flat clothes are a necessary thing in life?

Everyone is going stir crazy in Manchester. I think it’s been raining continuously for about 3 weeks now and everyone is going quietly mad. I think it would have helped if there had even been one day in the middle of it all where it had been sunny – no, just if it hadn’t rained – but there hasn’t. I’m not quite sure how much longer I can last before I *scream*.

 

Anyhoo, when it rains, the traffic always gets worse. We suddenly get lane-hoggers crawling along the fast lane at 40 as though it’s doing people a public service. We get a higher volume of cars because all the mothers decide their little darlings will melt in the wet weather and need a lift to school, even if its only a few hundred foot away from the house. And then of course we get the lunatics that reckon aiming obliquely at a large puddle at +80mph isn’t going cause one set of wheels to aquaplane while the other set of wheels will not, or that its only rain and therefore they don't need to take extra care when tail gating/under taking or squeezing into gaps, and these are the people who are usually causing the almost daily 30 min delays and lane closures because there has been a huge accident on such and such motorway.

 

It’s wearing. There was the worse gridlock so far last evening where (which our office is on the 5^th floor and we can look down over the science park) you could see all the roads for miles around jammed with angry car drivers honking at one another – I think this may have been due to floods. It took me nearly an hour to get to a garden centre that was only 10 mins away normally and I was furious by the time I got there. In fact, I have been a great big steaming ball of fury for about a week now and I think it's a least partly due to this endless grotty weather.

 

But at least I got a good bat box. Diggory doesn’t know it yet, but he’s going into the greenhouse this weekend. I’m going to miss the little begger fiercely but he needs space to stretch his wings and practise his flying and he’s not going to get that in his present residence.

 

I managed to tempt him to have a little go at flying last night too, as it happens. I persuaded him onto Glove, then held him as high as I could in his little tent residence and let instinct take over. Sure enough, he dangled himself from my fingertip and had a little echo locate around, then started whizzing his little wings as fast as he could and let go. Splat, he went, right onto the floor. Luckily it was a few inches so he wasn’t even dazed, and I scooped him up quickly for another crack at it.

 

Off he went again, dangling, echo locating, revving the wings up like a mini airoplane, launch and….splat. At that point he started to get fractious so I put him back on his roost and he curled up in his favourite cubby in the cloth next to the heated mat and sulked for the rest of the night.

 

So as you see…he’s ready mentally to start flying and I just need to give him the proper space. I reckon I’m going to rig a bat box in a dark(ish) corner (still with heated mat…Diggory’s such a lucky bat) and put some very fine mesh over the window and door, and then leave him to it. I’ll make sure his dropping point is well padded for a while until I’ve established he’s finally got the gist of it, and then all he has to do is prove to me he can corner, accelerate, signal and manoeuvre and I’ll leave the window open and let him go. He might also eat all the bugs who are living on my tomatoes.

 

One thing has been pointed out though. “Won’t all the glass in the greenhouse confuse him and he’ll fly around bashing himself to death against the windows?” asked someone. I thought about this for a while and I reckon he’s going to be ok because remember…a bat navigates via echo location so to him, a window is an opaque wall. At least that’s the theory anyhow and I’m going to have to watch him very carefully for a bit (hence the trial over the weekend). The other problem is going to be the light, so I may have to box off a special area in t’greenhouse especially for him that’s nice and dark and secure.

 

Ack well. I’ll keep you posted anyhow. Let’s hope it all goes ok, eh?

It seems the world had been hit with an attack of liquid nitrogen, or at least...Port Erin in the Isle of Man. For some reason I was sneaking around in the middle of the night looking at it and I remember the ground feeling very cold underfoot - but basically the sea in the bay had been flash frozen into powder and was now blowing away, leaving very oddly shaped patterns of sand underneath (the bay had also become incredibly deep, so standing on the edge looking down was scary and intimidating). The sand that used to be under the water was in vast undulating heaps and troughs stretching out as far as the eye could see, and sparkling and glittering with the flash frozen sea that was blowing away in the wind like powdery snow.

It had all defrosted again by the next day, and when I went down to the bay there were huge crowds gathering watching the sea roar back into the huge troughs and humps, obliterating them. Inevitably, as always happens, the sea came in just a little bit too much and the entire village at water level was flooded by a foot though the sea was dead calm, and again I was alone and wading through it all trying to work out if the sea had stopped coming in now and where the edge of the bay was where it suddenly gets very deep.

Warning! Following entry contains explicit content   more »

Apparently I was keeping huge insects (e.g. the size of my hand) in a box and running things like eviction night of Big Brother. I don't remember much except I was trying to get a huge earwig to curl around in this see thru jar around a butterfly thing, whilst muttering "...and who goes..? You decided".

Also...a bunch of floating jellyfish had escaped from the jar. These were like regular jellyfish, only they could swim in air like they normally can in water. Big buggers with long dangly tenticles like those portuguese men-o-war and they were all floating around in the room brushing at my face and arms and stinging them. One or two of them were particularly nasty because they were almost practically seethru, you could only see them if you looked very very hard but they still had a nasty sting if you brushed up against them. It made them almost impossible to catch though.

...and the while, the insects muttered quietly to themselves wondering which one was going to go next.