Rhi Axtell – Writer

Picture the scene:

It’s early evening. The sun is setting in the distance and the sky is the colour of an unripe orange. I’m sitting in a reclining outdoor chair in my mother-in-law’s garden. Here are some words to help you imagine said garden better: France, wall, trees, grass, courgettes, tomatoes, lizards, another tree, bushes, croquet set. There you go. You’ve got the scene in your head perfectly now.

It’s warm. I cradle a cup of tisane* in my hands and it steams politely.

*herbal tea

I’m staring up at the sky above me because flitting between the trees, moving in rapid, erratic flight paths, are bats. There must be ten or twenty above my head. I’m caught up in the rushing dip, dive, and twist of their movement. I try to follow one with my eyes, only for it to rapidly change direction at the last minute and I lose it in the fading light.

It turns out bat-watching is a fantastic way to pass the time.**

**or at least I thought so until I discovered the mosquito bites that littered my body the next morning.

Anyway, today’s spooky thing is bats.

I try to tell my mother-in-law about the experience of bat watching in her garden the next day in my best broken French. “J’ai vu… uhhh…” (I saw… uhhh). I can’t remember the word for bat in French. “Les souris dans le ciel?” (The mice in the sky?) I point upwards, and make a flapping motion with my hands, like that will someone help translate.

Luckily for me, the French word for bat is ‘chauve-souris‘ which directly translates to ‘bald mouse’. That meant that I successfully navigated another potentially disastrous, bilingual car crash and instead get a smile from my mother-in-law who does not assume that I am slowly losing my mind and hallucinating flying rodents.

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I’m about to take a stance now, which might upset some of you, particularly those with long hair who like to hang around in caves:

Bats are cute. Bats are not scary.

I know, I know, I can hear you gasping from here, but I said it and I cannot turn back now.

There are bats, its true, which drink blood and are called vampires. But, to counter that fact, nature also created a bat which looks like little piece of marshmallow (Google ‘Honduran white bat’ – you won’t be disappointed).

I actually think it is quite funny that Batman, a superhero based around using fear against his enemies and being super scary, is based on a bat.

Clearly he isn’t based on the bats in France, because I had one accidentally fly into me once. It could have quite easily sat on the palm of my hand, was so scared that it clung tightly to my trousers and refused to let go. The most terrifying thing it did was tremble a little. Honestly, it couldn’t have stopped me from committing crimes even if it tried.

I suppose the bat could of distracted me long enough for the police to catch me because I was too busy staring at it and saying “oh look, what a cute bat.” This situation also assumes that the bat called the police before clinging to my leg in adorable fear, which probably is unlikely.

I, however, would like to see version of Batman that harnesses the power of adorability to stop crime. Perhaps that is something they can explore in the Robert Pattinson Batman sequel.

Anyway, this blog post has gone wildly off the rails now, so I’m going to stop.

Goodnight. See you tomorrow.