Batty about bats

Bats are officially a protected species. If you want to knock your house down and start again you have to have a Bat inspector, rather like the Starling inspector in Fawlty Towers. If he suspects that there is the merest whiff of a bat residing in your loft or attic then you will be pursued by bureaucratic paper work and legislation for ever more.

First of all you will have to provide the bats with temporary accomodation in a sort of Bijou Bat house, while the work is being done. Then you will have to have a Bat recess built in the wall of your house. All this takes place without necessarily ever having seen a bat. Hopefully now they have been so well looked after , they will breed profusely and not be an endangered species any more.

Once, at a wedding in Southern Italy , I was alarmed to come upon loads of bats hanging from the roof of
a cave very near the lavish display of wedding cakes. My host reassured me by saying they bats are welcome guests because they eat all the mosquitoes.

One thing I have been told that might be useful is that if ever a bat comes too close for comfort , wrap a towel around your head because they cling to your hair and get stuck.