Gerald Durrel's Bathroom?

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I don’t know what it is with my bathroom but it is like a Zoo! Well actually I do know what it is - the drain from the bath goes directly outside my bathroom window and directly into the drain it is clearly at sufficiently a shallow angle to allow any and all animals smaller than drain size to come in as well water to go out. On a more or less daily basis I have any number of bugs coming in. Of course you will know that spiders are my least favourite; but fortunately Steph is completely unphased by them. I am so over cockroaches I just leave them there and they find their way out again. Little bugs are fine but the small scorpions worry me a bit. Most days I have a little lizard looking at me when I wander into the bathroom and they seemed to be shocked that I am there! Most of the time they scramble about for a bit trying to get up the sides of the bath and cannot manage it. Only the tiniest of baby geckos can make that journey. The bigger and prettier lizards with a black and white body and a blue tail, try for a while and either find their way back down the plug hole or if they can’t find their way back out I pick them up in a bowl and put them outside.

However yesterday was the worst! I haven’t been feeling too hot recently and I was longing for a long and lazy bath - with the absolute luxury of bath bubbles courtesy of Sarah. So I ran the hot tape and as I was waiting for the bath to fill I noticed a small scorpion on the rattan mat on my bedroom floor (I have an ensuite - did I mention that?). It was pretty flat and wasn’t moving and I thought that it must be dead. It’s only the second one I’ve seen so they are not too common a visitor fortunately, but I remember reading or being told somewhere sometime that small scorpions can be dangerous so I thought I would treat it with some level of suspicion. I decided to grab whatever was at hand to keep in one place and deal with after my bath. I didn’t have a glass to hand but I did have a roll of sellotape and I thought it’d probably have the same difficult climbing a 90° angle that the lizards do in the bath; so that would at least keep it there whilst I bathed and got dressed and I could deal with it later.

So I got into the bath bubbles and all - lovely - and then I noticed something sticking out of the overflow pipe; they looked suspiciously like spiders legs to me - rather large and black ones - so I yelped and jumped out of the bath. ‘Ok’ I thought ‘I’ll deal with it’ - ‘If I use the shower attachment and aim it at the overflow presumably whatever it is will be washed down the drain and away’…… Good thinking Batman….. Oooooh no! No, no, no…. I got the fright of my life when a lizard jumped straight out of the overflow into the bath - I yelped - louder this time - Steph came running and thought I’d died or something….. Anyway the lizard swam frantically around trying to get out and I tried to drain the bath but it was drowning so we managed to fish it out from under the bubbles eventually - but by that time the bath was kind of unsavoury and guess what the scorpion had vanished! Fantastic!

And this is all after I’ve tried to cover the drain with some old mosquito mesh. Next attempt is to tape mosquito mesh around the pipe itself - that should work - shouldn’t it? Last week we had three bats in the house on consecutive nights, but getting dive bombed by a bat and shutting myself in Steph’s bedroom is a whole other story………………..

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