WHAT THE *(&£* IS A COURGETTE?

It’s a zucchini. And an aubergine is an eggplant, and a Q-Tip is a Cotton Bud. Just so’s you know.

So anyway, I arrived safely, spent the first night at Matthew’s (which is more convenient to the airport) and then drove over to have dinner with my new housemate/landord and two friends. Matthew accompanied me as far as the new flat, mostly because I had three of the largest suitcases known to humankind, and he knew I would not actually be able to carry them up the stairs myself.

We took a taxi over, and the taxi driver, it turns out, is also the personal assistant/driver to the drummer from Iron Maiden whenever they are in town, which evidently they were for the past several days. Most of the trip was spent in listening to him talk about his experiences, and I secretly wondered if Matthew wished, well, you know, that one of the bands he’d been a drummer for had been as successful.

Anyway, we got to the house, and my new landlord/housemate showed me around. The first thing you’d notice is that every door and window is locked with at least two locks. This is internally as well as externally. When you leave the living room, for example, you have to lock the two locks.

There is also an alarm system, which is pretty straightforward, but the one tricky thing is that when you go upstairs to go to bed for the evening, you set it in a different way so that the bottom floor of the house is armed, while the top floor is not, so you can actually move about.

The house was freakishly clean when I arrived. I still don’t know if this was a “new guest I’m being polite” thing. But my landlord/housemate, who I shall call Peter, has very strong opinions about how things should be done.

For example, when he showed me the bathroom, he said, “of course, you’ll have your own towel,” meaning that I needed to make sure I either had one or got one, “which can be kept here,” and that sort of thing. He talked about how it would be better for all involved if I got a mobile phone and didn’t use the house one. This actually turns out to be correct, because if the phone rings and I’m upstairs, I have to rush down, disarm the security system, undo the two locks on the living room door, and by that time the phone has stopped ringing.

He’s a really nice and funny guy, by the way. Just very quirky. He knows it.

Anyway, I noticed as he was showing me around that there were a number of little plastic windmills in the back garden, which I didn’t pay too much attention to at the time, although they seemed out of character for him. He mentioned that there were several cats who prowled about the back yard at various times, as well as two foxes, but I couldn’t really tell if he liked cats or hated them.

All was revealed in a few days. I came home and he let me know that Radio 4 would be stopping by in the morning because they were interviewing people with Cat Problems. They came by with a news crew and with one of those Be Nice To Animals people, who had various things to scatter about the garden to frighten away cats. As I found out from listening to the radio station, Peter keeps the windmills in the back yard to frighten away cats. Hopefully we have no feline Don Quixote back there.

So Peter spent the next day scattering lion dung around the back yard. Yes, lion dung. Apparently this is supposed to frighten away cats. Radio 4 is coming back on Tuesday to do an update, and I’ll let you know how it goes.