Probably I should keep a much more formal diary rather than spilling on to a blog.
I actually do: about feelings, which I don't want to share with people I don't know in Japan and the Ukraine.
Sometimes it's cathartic to just spill though, and because I'm going to spend the morning writing, clearing last night's stress out of my brain seems like a really good idea.
We had been talking about moths and how it's great to stick all your clothes out there in a bin bag when it's frosty for a few days to kill the grubs. Last year was too mild to do it, but this year I thought I was in with a chance, and was planning to stick McDad's rugs out there for a while, covered in plastic so the rats didn't nest in them. They have been rolled up under the bed for two years with regular sprays of moth killer and those little sticky papers to catch them.
Catalysed by reading an article about a stately home that was completely infested, I started to bring the rugs down into the kitchen to vacuum them (forbidden by McDad when he was alive).
Alas, two of them have been
completely eaten. There are just threads left, and a horrible brown gritty sludge, which must be moth excrement. That's all that is left. The rest have holes and moth cobwebs, and I spent two hours frantically vacuuming them to try to get rid of any eggs that might be in them.
I won't roll them up again: they will have to be piled up on top of the ones in the living room and cleaned twice a week to protect them.
Moths have crept into everything to escape: the bed, crevices in the wall, the washing bag. I haven't got any more energy to pursue them. The daddy moths are so huge and resistant to being thwarted that I've christened them 'bull-moths'.
On reflection, I've concluded that we share our world with a lot of living things: out there in the yard there are sizeable rats, an occasional fox that presumably gobbles up the sizeable rats, little birds, Magpies that eat the baby birds, squirrels, a cat that catches and kills the squirrels. There were two toads that something has killed (one of them bounced into the toilet when Offsprog Two's friend was sitting having a wee, and gave her the fright of her life). There were wasps living in a hole in next-door's wall, and there are bees in summer visiting the flower that looks like Viper's Bugloss and isn't. A Wren has been visiting the annoying bush that grows too fast and there are Coal-tits that eat the peanuts before I get up in the morning and start crashing about in the kitchen. There are those two robins that came to watch me playing guitar once when I was standing at the kitchen window playing the electric guitar to get used to its neck (different from the Spanish), and that old blackbird that came and sang along when I was sitting out there playing the acoustic guitar one evening. There are Wagtails out in the street (wtf!) that run away from the cars on their spindly little legs.
Then there are us, the humans, clearing a space amongst all this, and carving out territories with fruitless cleanliness, and marking boundaries with walls and fences that mean nothing to nature's creatures.
There. That feels better. See you tomorrow.
