Feeling hot, hot, hot

eeeeh, its hot.
7pm and its hot.
One week and three more days and it will be even hotter.
In Menorca.

When you're sitting huddled around the fireplace with the central heating turned up in the middle of January you look forward to the long summer days and especially the long summer evenings when you can sit outside until the sun sets at 10pm and slurp long cold slurps of lager.

And you forget how hot the nights can be.

So you lie awake on top of the bed all night and you try to sleep but you catnap really, and the lager you've been drinking all night doesn't help that much because lager gives you a headache and you should have known that.

And then you do finally drift off to sleep eventually.

Until a bleedin owl takes up residence in a tree near your open bedroom window, and hoots.

Now I know that barn owls screech and barn owls are actually an endangered species which is shocking to me as they were two a penny round here when I was a kid, so I think this one was a tawny owl because it was doing that cartoon too-whit-too-whoo sort of hoot, and it was nice to lie there in the semi-dawn at around 4am and listen to it, I'm a soft sod for wildlife stuff like that.

But after an hour of hooting it was getting a little tiresome, however I have a secret weapon, the hearing in my right ear is now very poor, I'd say its around 10% of the left one, a residue of a childhood spent listening to extremely loud rock music with headphones which resulted in a perforated eardrum at one point, which then led to an infection and me poking around in the ear with pointy things, which led to a torn eardrum that never healed.

Anyway, the good news is that it means that I can lie on my good ear and hear fook-hall of what goes on in the night, so I did, and the owl noise disappeared, until I rolled over in my sleep and the good ear came into play again.

I left for work at 8am, it had been light for three hours and it was already very warm, but the bloody owl was still in a tree somewhere in the garden, hooting every five minutes or so, my theory is that its a young owl who was left there by a parent and it was calling for them, nice to listen to but a right royal pain when you're trying to sleep on a hot night.

And theres another thing - pigeon man who lives next door but one and (obviously) keeps about 40 homing pigeons in his garden has also invested in some ducks and chickens - and a fuckin rooster.

The rooster has to be locked in a darkened shed through the summer otherwise he starts crowing at first light at around 4am - last night someone forgot to draw the blackout curtains and the rooster woke up when the first rays burst the horizon.

So when the owl wasn't hooting the rooster was crowing.

I'm glad that the UK gun laws are so stringent because a shotgun would have found gainfull employment last night.