I’m sure that title has grabbed your attention, so I’ll explain! Something a little different… At the beginning of June we went to Granada for a weekend, for my birthday. We’ve been before, a few times, so we didn’t plan to go round the Alhambra again – though if you’ve never been then please make a point of seeing it, utterly fabulous! We just wanted a bit of R&R and lots of shopping in the fabulous little Moroccan shops that are everywhere.
The King and Queen of Spain visited the city on the Saturday, complete with massive military airshow, most exciting! I did think this was a very different way to celebrate my birthday but more was to come.
Somewhere along the weekend we both picked up food poisoning, no idea where, as we ate in so many different places. His was milder, mine was severe.
Managed to drive the 3-ish hours home on the Monday morning, straight into bed feeling like I’d been disembowelled by a 15th century torturer. Into the bathroom approximately every 15 minutes, morning, noon and night. Not actually funny at all, and at one point I genuinely thought I was dying, this was backed up by later reading about two women with the same problem who actually DID die. No joke.
About 2 hours after we got home I was actually asleep when the husband raced into the bedroom and shouted “Get up! There’s a snake in the bedroom!”
Indeed there was. About three feet long, looked like a ladder snake, usually harmless but still…
It shot across the room. We had to pull out, strip and dismantle the bed, lift all three pairs of the full length curtains up, pull out bedside cabinets, pull out the big chest of drawers…then suddenly the husband spotted it under a bag where I’d put the winter duvet when changing it over to the summer one. He put his size 12 foot on it and yelled at me to “Get it!” Get it? Get it?! Good grief, I was suffering the pains of hell from the food poisoning, and needed to be within a few steps of the bathroom, and he wanted me to “get it”?! Well, I ran downstairs to the kitchen, lifted the long tongs and ran upstairs again, grabbed the thing near its head, but not near enough. Had to make sure the husband didn’t move his foot, grabbed it again, right on its head and lifted it. It wasn’t happy. It wriggled and writhed, trying to wind itself round my arm while I tried not to be sick from one end or worse from the other. Got it into the bathroom, up with the blind, out through the rejas (security bars) and flung the thing as hard as I could, where it bounced off one of the lower roofs and disappeared.
So there you are, how to catch a snake! And…we found where it had got in, through the extractor fan vent in the kitchen which we’d been intending to properly seal off outside, and which is now well covered with very fine mosquito netting. Never put off till tomorrow what you really should have done weeks ago, that’s what I say!
P.S. I’m still not quite over the fact that the husband shouted “Get it!” to me….
My life in Spain 