The Challenges of Home Ownership, Part 1: The Pigeon in the Chimney

As you can see from the title I am anticipating that there will be other challenges as well. But this is one we didn't expect.

We came home from our now rather-too-regular Friday evening post-work/week drink at Mango Landin' to discover a large pile of crumbled fire brick filling the living room fireplace and spilling out onto the carpet in front. Odd we thought, but it had been a bit windy so perhaps something had got dislodged in the chimney and fallen down the stack onto our carpet. A bit annoying, but we hoovered it up and thought nothing more of it.

Coming home again on Saturday evening - this time after a long, exhausting and extremely expensive shopping spree in High Street Kensington to buy clothes, toiletries, medical supplies and other sundries for our upcoming trip - there was another little pile of chimney detritus in the fireplace, this time with a few small feathers scattered over the top. And some birdshit.

Hmm. Odd, we thought again. But hoovered it up... And then K found a torch in one of our semi-unpacked boxes and stuck it up the chimney. There, just a little way up, is a ledge, where the flue from our fireplace connects with the chimney stack. And there, on the ledge, was a pigeon. We decided to call it Petunia.

What to do? Googling 'How to get a pigeon out of your chimney' turns up a variety of hilarious home videos on YouTube, whose advice - in the end - we had to fall back on, because Lambeth Council had no interest in coming out at a weekend, and a private company we called, who claimed to have a 30 to 90 minute rapid response time and no call-out fee, told us they didn't handle incidents involving single birds. If we had a whole family of pigeons up our chimney that would have been fine.

K tried with a poke to encourage the pigeon down off the ledge and into the living room - having previously opened all the windows wide - but this didn't succeed in doing what it was meant to, and just traumatised the poor bird. Having waited until Sunday morning to call Lambeth Pest Control - which someone had told us might respond on a Sunday, only to discover that no, try again on Monday, which was clearly unhelpful - K pondered for a while and came up with a new tactic involving a colander and a cardboard box. It may have been the same colander that he used to catch the family of mice that plagued us while we were renting Yamin's flat in Catford. Poor K - he gets all the duff jobs.

Method: gently insert colander into chimney flue (K) while holding cardboard box in front of fireplace (M). Place colander over bird and pull it out of chimney and into cardboard box. Fold down leaves of box lid. Hold tight while carrying box outside into front garden. Gently open box to lower pigeon onto ground, in case wings are damaged from colander treatment or it's weak from 3 days in a chimney. Stand back in amazement while pigeon powers up up and away, not able to get away fast enough.

Only problem is that clearly the top of the chimney is uncapped and it may happen all over again at any time. We're just hoping that it doesn't happen again while we're in Central Asia!

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And talking of which - we're off tonight!!!! We're leaving the flat in an hour to head to Heathrow, arriving in Tashkent tomorrow morning. Neither of us can quite believe it yet, but I guess it will hit us pretty quickly! For the last week or so we've both been having conversations with people that go something like:

M/K: "I'm off on holiday next week."

Friend/colleague: "Oooh, where are you going?"

M/K: "Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Iran."

Friend/colleague (slightly nervously): "Oooookaaaay...." Then realises we're serious. "Wow - exotic!"

I think it will be the trip of a lifetime. So watch this space around the beginning of May, after we get back, for a full report! Until then - Happy Easter!

It was 30 years ago today...

© Neil Libbert for the Observer - see other photos here

The Brixton riots broke out - the worst racially motivated riots in UK history I think, a combination of severe social deprivation, including 55% unemployment among black youths in Brixton, and disproportionate stop-and-search tactics on the part of the police, which erupted violently one April weekend. Nearly 300 policemen were injured in the riots and many buildings were burned.

I remember them - or I remember hearing about them from the news and people around me talking about them, as I was only 6 years old. But they have always been something I have wanted to understand better. There was an event in Brixton yesterday to mark 30 years on from the 'Brixton Uprising' and I would have liked to have gone along, but alas I had an article to finish writing (which I sent off today - hurray!). I have been watching these excellent short films on YouTube, Battle 4 Brixton, which weirdly shows places that I know very well from living here but looking terribly run-down 30 years ago. This edition of the Radio 4 programme, The Reunion, is also very instructive.

The Brixton riots led to a change in Metropolitan police tactics but it seems to be taking a very long time for these to really change at grass roots. Linton Kwesi Johnson talked on the radio this morning about how his grandson still faces stop-and-search by the police in Brixton today. You like to think that everything is much better socially in Brixton now, but looking back on a day like today makes you think about whether that is actually the case. There is certainly still a lot of unemployment and disaffection among black youths which leads to gang activity. God, how white middle class do I sound? It makes you remember that there are two social strata in Brixton - the comparatively privileged home-owning, mainly white, middle classes and the more disadvantaged majority that live all around us in the council estates. One does well to remember.

We're in - and I'm off again!

Imagine this. You move house at the weekend. You don't take any time off work the next week but instead try to write an 8500 word essay for an exhibition catalogue which should be finished at the end of the week - you don't succeed. You take your mind off how tired you are by going to see The Eagle on Friday night (excellent). You spend Saturday thinking about and writing the talk you have to give the next day at your book launch! You relax on Saturday night by having your sister to stay in the new flat. You attend book launch - it seems to go well though it would have been nice if more people had been there. But it was Mothers' Day and the sun was shining. After lots of hobnobbing at said book launch you go out for Mothers' Day lunch with your mother. You eventually go home but can't collapse because early the next morning you are going to Amsterdam for 3 days to take part in a conference about 'Presenting "Islamic" Art in the Contemporary Context'. You are on a panel, something you have never done before, asked to present for 10 minutes on 'What makes Islamic art Islamic?' and to respond to three key questions the conference organisers have posed, which you don't understand. You will fly back from Amsterdam early Thursday morning and go straight into work, because you then have 3 working days to finish the aforementioned catalogue essay and deal with everything else that needs to be done before going away until the end of the month, to Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Iran... Who would manage to arrange such a crazy work schedule? Me, that's who.

We're in Day 2 of Amsterdam at this point. I have participated in the panel today - which seemed to go ok actually - and tomorrow unexpectedly have the morning off, before participating in a Think Tank in the afternoon about a planned exhibition of Islamic art. We're being well looked after, and staying in the once-grand musaktastic Hotel Krasnapolsky - I am blogging from the lobby, the first time I have managed to get online (we don't have an internet connection yet in the new flat) and not had to worry about change-of-address admin, trying to move over our contents insurance, etc etc.


The new flat is great, though we went through a stage the middle of last week of being very disorientated and slightly traumatised by the whole uprooting/touching down in a new place (though at the same time not new because only 250 m from the old place) where we don't know anyone. Probably because we were so tired and hadn't taken any time off work to 'settle in'. As you can see from the photos, we're living in a state of semi-chaos, semi-civilisation - we unpacked the kitchen, the bedroom and about half the living room, so it is livable in and it is starting to feel like home. But we're putting everthing else on hold until we get back from Central Asia.

My half hour's free internet connection is about to run out, and there's the conference dinner to rush to in a moment, so I will sign out for now. We should get online at home on Thursday so I will aim to blog again before our travel adventures! Just wanted to check in as I know some of you are wondering how the move went... I leave you with some flamingoes in Amsterdam zoo.