7 Reasons

Tag: Room

  • 7 Reasons Not To Have A Bat In Your Dining Room

    7 Reasons Not To Have A Bat In Your Dining Room

    This may come as something of a surprise to regular readers of 7 Reasons, but we’re not experts on everything that we write about.  Often, our pieces contain much speculation and conjecture.  Today’s piece, however, is different.  Today’s piece is written from experience.  If you should find yourself in a dining room with a bat, this is exactly how it will go down.

    1.  Surprise!  As you sit in your dining room on a quiet Saturday night catching up on missed television programmes using the iPlayer, you’ll feel relaxed and at ease.  You’ll take a sip of your drink and languidly stretch out your legs.  You’ll stifle a yawn and stretch out your arms.  Eventually, you’ll lean back in your seat and glance up toward the ceiling light, to ascertain what is casting the strange shadow that you have seen from the corner of your eye for the past few seconds.  Then you’ll scream involuntarily and bolt from the room and slam the door shut behind you.  A large bat flying around your dining room will come as something of a surprise to you.

    2.  Disbelief.  “What’s wrong?  What’s wrong?” Your wife will enquire in a startled manner, somewhat surprised by your shrieking.

    “There’s a bat in the dining room.”

    “What?”

    “There’s a bat in the dining room.”

    “What?”

    “Bat!” (You’ll flap your arms about miming flight at this point).  “Dining room!” (You’ll also point at the dining room.)

    “What’s it doing in there?”

    “Flying around the ceiling lamp and watching a documentary about Stalin.”

    Rather disbelievingly, your wife will go to the dining room, open the door slightly and peer through the gap.  On closing it very quickly, she will then announce that “there’s a bat in the dining room”.

    3.  Spin.  Anxious that you should always see the positive side of any situation, you’ll start brainstorming.  A bat in the dining room could be a good thing, you’ll think.  A bat in the dining room would mean that there would never be any insects in there.  A bat in the dining room would ensure that you could write in there with absolutely no chance of interruption:  You could look at the internet with no chance of interruption!  A bat in the dining room would…be a bloody great bat in the dining room.  It turns out that the elephant in the room is that there’s a bat in the room.  There’s no upside so good that it can surmount the fact that your dining room contains a bat.

    4.  Whimsy.  Having established that having a bat in the dining room is a bad thing, you’ll turn your mind to what the hell to do with it.  “We could call the RSPCA”, your wife will suggest.

    “We’re not being cruel to it.  We’re being inconvenienced by it.”

    “Perhaps there’s a local bat group.”

    “Yes, maybe they could send some sort of bat man.”

    “A dog warden?”

    “Or, we could call Commissioner Gordon and he could raise the bat-signal.  Perhaps we could…”

    5.  Motivation.  “…Oh my god!”

    “What?!”

    “My gin and tonic’s in there!”

    6.  De-batting. “Darling”, you’ll say, “We’re just going to have to man-up and deal with the bat ourselves…In you go.”  This motivational speech will fail to make her deal with the bat on your behalf, so you’ll have to work as a team.  You will close every door in the house (so the bat can’t start terrorising you in other rooms) and your wife will peer back into the dining room.  She will find that the bat is still flying around in there, fluttering in haphazard circles around the ceiling light like a terrifying and gigantic moth.  A behemoth*.  You’ll formulate a plan.  You will run in, raise the blind, open the window and run out again:  Your wife will be in charge of opening and closing the door.  You’ll take a deep breath and steel yourself for the task.  Eventually, though too soon for you, your wife will open the door and you will burst into the room and stride toward the blind.  Startled by the sudden presence in the room, the bat will realise that flying around is not a safe thing to do and he will decide to land.  At the very instant that you arrive at the blind, the bat will land on it, inches from your face.  “Aaaarrrgghhh”, you’ll scream as you run out of the room.  Your wife will close the door.

    You’ll realise that another plan is called for.  If you raise the blind with the bat on it, you’ll just squash the bat.  You’ll have a flat bat.  And bats, if you flatten them, appear bigger.  So, if you can’t raise the blind and open the window, you’ll have to trap the bat and remove it.  Having rummaged in the kitchen cupboard for a suitable container for a considerable time, your wife will emerge with her Tupperware bat-trap.  This time, she will be in charge of trapping the bat, and you will be in charge of the door (yay!) and the lid (boo!).  You’ll open the door and your wife will stride in and head toward the blind with the container held out in front of her.  Arriving at the blind she’ll cover the bat with the container.  Now that the bat is safely contained, you’ll enter the room clutching the lid.  You’ll slide the lid slowly and carefully between the blind and the Tupperware box and affix it.  Phew.

    7.  Post-bat.  As you breathe your sigh of relief the bat will let out a heart-rending squeak.  Your wife will head into the back garden to release the bat and you’ll be in charge of the back door (yay again!).  The moment that the lid is removed, the bat will flutter out and your wife will scream and run toward the door, which will cause you to laugh.  Briefly.  Eventually, having congratulated your wife on her brave conduct in the face of a big, scary bat and having closed every window in the house (twice), you’ll return to the comfort and security of Josef Stalin and your gin and tonic.   Then you’ll discover that the bat has left you a “present” on your white Verner Panton stackable chair.

    So there you go.  That’s roughly what will happen if you have a bat in your dining room.  I don’t recommend it.

    *You’ll be inordinately proud of that wordplay.

     

  • 7 Reasons Windowgate Is Baffling

    7 Reasons Windowgate Is Baffling

    If you’re at all interested in cricket or windows, then you can’t have failed to have noticed that, in a tale that came to be known as Windowgate, a window in the England dressing room got broken by Matt Prior at Lord’s yesterday.  This story then snowballed taking many unexpected twists and turns along the way.  I was listening as events unfolded.  Here are seven reasons that the story is baffling.

    1.  The Explanation.  The ECB’s initial explanation for the incident was that “the glass had been broken after Prior’s gloves ricocheted off a kit bag and knocked the bats, resting on the window pane.”  This seemed almost entirely plausible.  To the abjectly mad.  People who have no concept of the relative mass and density of gloves and bats might also be misled by this statement.  I, as an owner of both gloves and bats, however, am not taken in by what we can only call the Magic Glove theory.  I can categorically state that in over thirty years of glove ownership, I have never seen one ricochet.

    2.  The Withdrawal Of The Explanation.  By the time the explanation was withdrawn, my speculation had become fevered.  So if it wasn’t a Magic Glove, what was it?  Was a lone glove-man in the England dressing room hurling gloves at bats from a grassy knoll?  Were bats being hurled from book depositories?  Were books being hurled from bat depositories?  Was there a shadowy third glove-hurler in the showers?  Oh, they’ve withdrawn the explanation now.  Wait!  That makes it seem even more sinister and mysterious.

    3.  The Explanation For The Withdrawal Of The Explanation.  On withdrawing his initial explanation, England spokesman James Avery said that he “had been working from second-hand information”.  He failed to mention that not only was the information second-hand, it was also implausible gibberish.  After all, second-hand information isn’t intrinsically bad.  I didn’t find out about the sinking of the Titanic first-hand, and I’m fairly sure that you didn’t either.  I’m confident that it happened though, and in the manner that it was told to me.  To blame the implausibility and inaccuracy of a laughably shoddily fabricated account on it being second-hand is preposterous.  What he should have done is blame it on an idiot, because there’s definitely one involved there somewhere.

    4.  The All-New Explanation.  The ECB then had another go at explaining the breakage.  “Prior had his bat on the ledge where the wall met the window of the dressing room. The bat handle bounced off the wall onto the glass and the glass broke.”  Ah, this sounds more plausible (as most things do when there isn’t a magic glove involved).  This account of events is far more believable than the first, unless, that is, you’re an exponent of that arcane and little-known (to the ECB) science, physics.  Newton’s law states that “to every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction”, and that holds true in this case.  In my over thirty years of bat-ownership, I’ve never seen one move of its own accord.  I also believe that if England possessed a magic or sentient bat, Straussy would have been using it in the second innings, so we can be certain that this is a conventional cricket bat.  This means that for it to have bounced off the wall, there must have been an action to which the bat was reacting.  In this case, the only possible explanation is that the England dressing room at Lord’s has a twitching wall; a wall that twitched and caused the bat handle to bounce onto the glass, which then shattered.  In the interests of research I googled “Lord’s twitching wall” and found no account of it, which is strange for a cricket ground with such a well-documented history.  I smelled a rat.*  The second explanation was no better than the first.

    5.  Just What Are They Trying To Keep From Us? So if neither of those explanations are to be believed, what could possibly have happened in that dressing room that would cause the ECB to go to such lengths to cover it up?  Some sort of second Roswell incident?  Was Glen Miller in there?  The Loch Ness Monster?  All the ECB seem to have achieved with their accounts of the incident is to fuel much conjecture, discussion, speculation and publicity.

    6.  I Have A Theory Of My Own.  Some may call it fanciful, some may call it far-fetched, some may call it pie-in-the-sky, but here’s what might – in my mind – have happened.  Competitive sportsman Matt Prior, who was, according to an eye-witness, “…cursing and muttering when he walked up the stairs to the pavilion”, furious at being run out, entered the dressing room and angrily hurled his bat to the floor. It then ricocheted off the floor and struck the window, causing it to break.  This theory of mine is unsubstantiated, unlike the Twitching Wall theory, which has been endorsed by Andrew Strauss (though he was on the balcony at the time and didn’t see it himself), but it does have some advantages over either of the explanations offered by the ECB:  It’s plausible, it’s physically possible, it doesn’t involve a magic glove, it doesn’t involve a twitching wall, and James Avery didn’t say it.

    7.  The Biggest Mystery Of All.  If my theory were, in fact, true, no one would have batted an eyelid at that course of events.  No one was badly hurt and Prior apologised and was fined.  We would all have put it down to a bit natural frustration and moved on.  The ECB seem to have taken what was a very unremarkable incident and have turned it into Windowgate: An epic tale of ineptitude, implausibility, bullshit and chicanery.   Quite why they did this is the most baffling thing of all.

     

    *Figuratively.

     

  • 7 Reasons Not To Ignore The Elephant In The Room

    7 Reasons Not To Ignore The Elephant In The Room

    Come on, hands up. How many of you have noticed an elephant in the room and then just turned the other cheek? Be honest. Well that was very risky of you. Don’t you know the dangers? In keeping with tradition, here are seven, yes seven, reasons why ignoring it was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Just wrong.

    Banksy Elephant In The Room

    1.  Love. If an elephant has entered your room there are a number of possibilities as to why. Maybe they’re lost? Maybe you’re lost (and elephant’s trunk)? Maybe they’re bored of the savanna and now want to live in Bolton? Whichever it is, ignoring them is not the way to go. The chances are they will be nervous, afraid and sceptical of their new surroundings, so the least you can do is make them feel loved and welcome.

    2.  Damage. Elephants are big lumps of meat and probably not too dexterous when it comes to tight spaces. As a result you need to watch it like a hawk. If you so much as glance back at facebook you could find yourself losing that impending insurance claim. If the elephant treads on the coffee table and the TV and the wife, but you’ve been too busy poking some fifteen year-old on the internet to notice, well, it’s just going to be your word against the elephants. And people just don’t beat elephants. At anything.

    3.  Water. This will affect those of you who have a water meter more than those who just pay for the buffet ‘all you can use’ service. Elephants like water. Sometimes they like spraying it at clowns, but for the most part they like drinking it and washing themselves with it. Unlike the bush, your home probably has water on tap. If that elephant gets anywhere near your kitchen you are going to be consolidating your debts quicker than you can say ‘Accident Help Line’.

    4.  Sticky Buns. I have no idea whether elephants and their carnal desires towards sticky buns is in fact a truth or merely a myth. The last place I want to discover if it is the former however, is in my lounge. As a result the elephant shall not move from my line of vision. And if you don’t want an elephant sucking on your weekly pleasure, I suggest you do the same.

    5.  Mates. Don’t be so naive as to think the elephant is alone. Chances are, half his/her pride are waiting outside while he/she checks out places to stay for the night. Perhaps they are headed to Scotland for the Elephant Polo World Championships? But don’t think about heading off to the study to research this on Wikipedia, because if you disappear for  evne just a split-second Babar and his mates will be flying through that hole in the wall and making them selves comfy on the sawdust. Or the sofa as it was known earlier that day.

    6.  Hunters. Sadly, you are not the only endangered species here. It is quite possible that the elephant is hiding at yours because some git is after his/her tusks. I can’t believe for a minute that you are pro-elephant hunting, so you won’t let it back on the street, will you? Instead you must protect it. And protecting it means keeping an eye on it at all times. If you let it wander off to the kitchen alone the hunter will see his opportunity. He won’t waste a moment. Before you know it he will have popped his weapon through the cat flap and fired off rapidly. You’d need more than a Kleenex to clear up that mess.

    7.  Comfort. Or lack of it. The elephant in the room is glaring. The elephant in the room makes everyone uncomfortable. The elephant in the room is a hindrance to achievement. The elephant in the room scares the cat. The elephant in the room keeps squashing unused lemons into the carpet. It’s getting ridiculous. It’s time to stop ignoring it. You must deal with the elephant now. Right now. It’ll be for the best. We promise.