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!

----------------------------------------------------------

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!