MmeOiseau comes for tea

What an adventure I had on Thursday!

After the school run I returned home to the sound of a bird squawking in distress. It was so loud that I thought that somehow our dog Daphne had caught a bird and was eating it. Steeling myself for scenes of carnage I searched the kitchen and dining room but could not see anything. Shouting out for Daphne, I was surprised when she wandered sleepily out from under the desk in the office looking rather put out at the shouting and squawking so early in the morning. She is not a morning person, our Daphne.

I discovered to my horror that the noise was coming from the air vent in the kitchen where a bird was trapped. We had some kind of insect trapped in there last year but it either escaped or died in there because after a day or so there was no more noise.

Thankfully my landlord arrived to deal with it. After some moments of teeth-sucking and chin-stroking he identified the problem that there was a bird in the flue. Of course, he had to take my word for it as MmeOiseau decided to chose that moment to wander off and stop chirping. She had been twittering away all day but when my landlord was listening carefully, there was not a sound.

We checked the loft and he looked at the roof and decided he would have to get someone out with a big ladder. Or at least, that is what I understood. We had just returned to the kitchen when MmeOiseau started chirping up a storm. Landlord asked for a ladder (new word of the day: la échelle) and a screwdriver (another new word: la tournevis) to open the vent. He unscrewed the vent, while I went looking for a larger screwdriver.

Suddenly he shouted, “Madame!Vite! Vite! Schnell!” and I ran back to the kitchen to find the sparrow in the corner of the kitchen with Daphne guarding it. Daphne was rather bemused by the whole thing and seemed to be chuffed to have cornered it but unsure how to proceed further.

I moved Daphne out of the kitchen into the hall and the bird flew, not out of the window but into the living room, the door of which we had stupidly left open. Following the sound of her fluttering wings, I found her hidden behind the a chair. What followed would not have been out of place in a Mr Bean episode, as the landlord and I tried to usher the bird out of one of the many windows that were open. In three different languages we implored MmeOiseau to depart la maison. She hid behind the newspaper rack, flew atop of the corner unit before finally sneaking under the couch.

I had only a moment to be very relieved that husband had last week decided to move the couch while spring cleaning and had removed a variety of items, ranging from Panini football stickers to bits of bread rolls, slippers, broken glass from the lampshade football incident and even a missing library book!

Using the walking stick that my father bought and left here for us to transport back to Scotland, the landlord shoved MmeOiseau out from under the couch. She flew back into the kitchen and I hastily shut all doors to stop her going anywhere else. A quick shufty behind the pots and then with a little more encouragement she flew to sit on the top of the window frame. Then with a flutter of wings, she was gone.

Heaving a sigh of relief, I thanked my landlord for his help. Hopefully that was the last we will see of MmeOiseau. And that if she does comes back, she does not bring her friends.