Something Hitchcock never considered for the shower scene
Nonetheless, if I were to step out of my front door naked around breakfast time, the chances are that I could do that 360 times out of 365 without seeing anyone. And both the back and the front door give directly onto our living space – no vestibules, no boot rooms, no hallways. When it rains, we traipse mud into the house.
It’s probably the beetles that we notice most often. We'll be watching telly or reading or something and one of them will heave into view. They are quite large and they seem loath to go. We scoop them up and pop them outside, and minutes later they are back. Of course, I may just be insectist and thinking it’s the same beetle when, in fact, I am denying a different beetle its individuality.
I remember the first praying mantis. I was intrigued. It perched on the side of the telly, in cathode ray tube days, and stayed there. Creepy-crawlies and flying things we get all the time. The cats tend to cause damage when they pursue one of the large jumping grasshopper-type things. Wasps and flies occasionally get past the fly curtain, but ants, scorpions (very few in all the years), leaf-cutters, and as many spiders as you could vacuum up come to see us all the time. Some of the spiders are large. Most of the occasional visitors we shoo out or scoop up on kitchen roll, but every now and then we have no alternative but to wage chemical warfare to slay armies of ants or to cope with annoyingly buzzy flies. The ones that I’m a bit worried about are the centipedes. They are much larger than their UK cousins, they run fast, and I understand they bite, though I am, happily, unable to verify that.
The little wall lizards scooting across the walls and hanging around by the light fittings that attract their potential supper cause us no concern and seem very well behaved. I’m never sure whether the little snakes, usually very thin and only 70 cm or so, have slithered into our living room to see if they can catch up on Wheel of Fortune or whether they were carried inside by our overzealous cats, but either way they are easy enough to handle with gardening gloves and off they go across the fallow land opposite when given the choice.
I think my personal favourites are the toads. Alicante province is often parched, but the toads, which I associate with squelchy ground, don’t seem to know that. They just turn up. One of our rooms that gives directly onto an exterior patio is often home for a while to toads. From a distance the toads often look more like turds, and I’ve been surprised several times by a toad lurking underneath the still moist shower sponge in the shower basin. Actually, we've not had any yet this year, and that's a little concerning because we always have had in previous years. The chap/ess in the photo is one of ours.
A lot less common, in fact in twenty years it's happened three times, is that we end up with something large flying around our living room. The starling sitting on a lamp fitting that we have hanging from the roof was memorable. That might have been topped by the bat, but the bat came and went without too much intervention on our part, while the bird fluttered from one place to another for an age and left a trail of calling cards.
Our cats, four at the moment, slaughter little bunnies but, fortunately, they have never practised their barbarism inside the house up to now. From time to time bloodied flesh, strips of fur and inedible kidneys litter our various patios. They bring us shrews and mice, which often escape their feline tormentors to die in some hidey-hole. We only realise when that putrid smell of rotting flesh reaches our nostrils.
Outside the house, but only just, the rabbits play – it used to be hares but now it’s nearly all rabbits – we get the occasional fox wondering about cat food, there are hedgehogs too, and quite a while ago now, a family of wild boar were snorting and foraging just outside our property. Owls screech on and off all through the night, and during the day the swallows customise the paintwork on the cars. Most of the other birds are typical of any British garden, even if they are different varieties: the finches, tits, blackbirds, sparrows, pigeons, cuckoos and wagtails. We have a couple of hoopoes too, which I always think of as being a bit exotic even though they are as common as muck here.
Wasps get a whole paragraph. They come in clouds to drink/collect water. Most humans react to wasps by waving their arms in some strange version of semaphore. There are so many wasps near any water, in our case the cat water bowls but, for lots of people, their swimming pools, that you are almost bound to get stung over time. That's simply because, eventually, you will not notice one in the very spot where you decide to put your hand, or your bottom, or your coffee cup. The wasp, thinking it is under attack, will defend itself. I've been pleasantly surprised by how painless the stings have been, but Maggie had to go to the health centre for an injection, as she had some sort of horrible reaction.
So, all in all, we are surrounded by and live with all these other creatures. Most of the time we barely notice them. They are simply part of the house, the garden and the land around us. Perhaps that’s what makes it rural. Not the lack of street lights or the distance to the nearest bread shop, but the fact that a beetle can wander into the sitting room, a toad can take up residence in the shower, a snake can cross the floor, and neither of us is particularly surprised.
Very interesting!
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