Sometimes I forget that I live in a country filled with wild and exotic (and sometimes dangerous) animals. I’ve lived here for nearly seven years now and have never seen a snake or shark outside of at zoo or aquarium. I have bumped into the occasional spider but not the scary kind popular in stories about outhouse toilets.
Contrary to popular belief, kangaroos do not bound down the streets of Australia’s major cities and wombats avoid people if at all possible. So it’s always a surprise when one comes face to face with a creature that isn’t a cat or a dog (and as I’ve said recently, I could quite happily spend the rest of my life avoiding contact with them too).
So I thought I’d share a rather strange experience I had last night.
It has been unnaturally hot here recently. Anyone who watched the first week of the Australian Open would have seen highly fit athletes hallucinating and fainting as they battled with 44 degree temperatures. So you can imagine how a lowly fit accountant like me felt just walking from the station to my house. We had five days in the mid-forties and as the old Harp ad used to say, “You could fry an egg on a car bonnet, if you had an egg”.
Thankfully the house I’m now walking to has air-conditioning. So at least I can sit comfortably each evening as long as I can block out the guilt I feel about destroying the planet.
We moved into a new place recently and it’s a modern structure with amenities like the aforementioned aircon, a whizzer thing in the sink for mushing up all the gunk you’re too lazy to put into the bin and a central control panel that allows you to turn off all the lights in the house.
But the thing we like best are the sky lights in the upstairs bedroom. These can be opened or closed using a remote control and they are sensitive enough to close themselves when it gets windy or starts to rain.
It was another hot day yesterday with the sort of conditions that makes the moisture on your eyeballs evaporate and your lungs suck frantically for air. Thankfully at 7.30pm, the unique climatic conditions in Southern Victoria paid us a welcome visit. The winds changed direction and in thirty minutes the temperatures had dropped by twenty degrees. It’s called the cool change and believe me, it’s as cool as Fonzie.
The house still needed to cool down however, so we opened the skylight windows to let some air in. I retired to bed early as sleep comes at a premium when you are the parent of a two year old who likes to get up at 5.30am so that she can make a good start at the day.
I was in the land of nod at midnight, dreaming of lie ins and Arsenal winning another trophy in my two year olds lifetime. Then a whirring sound awoke me. The skylights were doing their automatic closing thing. While annoying, this wasn’t surprising. Cool changes by their nature are accompanied by strong winds. I was about to roll over and try to recatch the sleep bus when I heard a strange noise coming from one of the windows. It was as though the venetian blinds that are part of the window set up had got caught in the mechanism as the window was trying to close.
I arose from the bed grumpy and half asleep to try and find the remote control. I turned on a bed light but the room was dim and my eyelids were heavy and half closed. As I approached the skylight I looked up and saw a dark shape. My first instinct was that it was a bird that had somehow got itself trapped. But as I got closer I found myself looking at a large rat like creature that appeared to be hanging from the venetian blind directly above my bed and about to fall at any second.
A number of shadowy thoughts raced through my mind. I don’t like sharing the planet with rats, I certainly don’t want to share a house with one. How we would trap it in a house that has few doors? And were there any hotels nearby that would provide me and my family a refuge for the night?
I’m not ashamed to say that I screamed like a twelve year girl at a One Direction concert and sought sanctuary in a downstairs room that had the luxury of a door I could hide behind. My wife grew up on a farm and she’s far calmer than me when it comes to dealing with the ugly cousins of God’s animal kingdom.
She armed herself with a sweeping brush and took off to investigate. The first thing she noted was that it wasn’t a rat but an adolescent possum. I’ve no idea how she knew it was adolescent. Perhaps it was acting moody and wearing dark clothes. She also pointed out that the windows have fly screens to stop creatures from climbing in. So the possum wasn’t hanging from the venetian blinds. It was sitting on the fly screen and had been greatly disturbed by a large window trying to squash it.
My wife pressed the button to reopen the window and poked the possum with her broomstick. The furry creature took off like Usain Bolt to return to his tree home to update all his friends on his adventure in the manner in which I am now telling this tale.
I didn’t actually see the possum disappear. I was still huddled under a downstairs blanket breathing deeply to avoid the onset of hyper-ventilation. I am what Australians would call a “wuss” and to be honest I’m comfortable with that depiction. To quote a lyric from a song I heard in my teens, “I’m not afraid of the dark. But I am afraid of what some things do with it”.
