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!

Finally on the move?

Perhaps it's time to announce that it looks like we're buying a flat. I have been a bit wary of saying anything to anyone, after our unsuccessful attempt to buy a flat in our block last year - but though we haven't exchanged contracts yet (hope to do so this week) it all seems to be going through smoothly this time around. Of course we keep touching wood every time we think or talk about it - actually we should probably be carrying little bits of wood around in our pockets, or like the Log Lady in Twin Peaks, remember her? Funny how we still cling to these superstitions, no matter how secularised we are in the rest of our lives...

Anyway perhaps I will say no more on the subject until it is signed and sealed. But we have decided to prepare ourselves for the putative move by starting to clear out our possessions - of which we have far too many anyway so it is a Good Thing To Do. In the past we used to move every few years, so would have a cathartic clear-out at every move, but we have been where we are now for about 7 and a half years so we have been acquiring without shedding.

Mainly books. We ran out of bookshelf space long ago, and a while back I adopted a one-in-one-out policy. We have now weeded a very large stack of novels and unread non-fiction books and yesterday I spent several hours putting them up for sale on Amazon. (If you're interested, you can view my storefront here). By the time we were leaving to go out for dinner at Abi's, I had sold one!! Very exciting, even if only for the grand sum of £1. Thing is, now I obsessively check my email to see if I have sold any more - none so far...

Today I have gone through my clothes and cupboards and filled three bin liners with stuff for the charity shop and another of rubbish. It's a start - and quite satisfying too.

Next stage is getting rid of the furniture that there just isn't room for in the new place. Anyone for a lectern??


This was an impulse buy from the junk shop on Brixton Hill ... last summer? It looked smaller on the street than it turned out to be once we got it into the flat! I think we thought we might one day live in a huge farmhouse with an enormous kitchen where we could use this for standing cookery books on... Also, even though its tracery is obviously rather damaged, it has a fantastic dedicatory plaque:

which announces that it was 'Presented to the Dulwich Road Wesleyan Mission Hall by the Trustees as a Memorial of the late Miss Craig's interest in and generosity towards the work of the Mission. 1898'. The antiquarians in us got the better of us! Who was this Miss Craig and how did her interest and generosity manifest itself? And how did the lectern come to the sad pass of sitting outside the junk shop on Brixton Hill...? At least we have admired and loved it while it has been with us... But alas, no room for extraneous lecterns in the new flat.

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This evening we have given ourselves 'repetitive form injury', as K so wittily put it just now, by filling out - in duplicate - visa forms for Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Iran, where we are going in April!! Very exciting - though we have not had much time to think about it. It's an organised tour, so once the visa hassle is out of the way we don't actually have to do anything, except turn up at the airport at the right time - but the forms are a killer, especially since we hardly handwrite anything any more. Next thing to arrange is to be fingerprinted at the Iranian consulate - an arrangement insisted upon by Iran ever since the British government introduced compulsory fingerprinting for any Iranian citizens wishing to enter the UK. Ahhh, so great to live in a liberal democracy...