Member-only story
The Day We Couldn’t Save the Baby bird
Sometimes the advice doesn’t work…
We used to live in a huge old house. We were renting it, and it was pretty much the only place available in the area we needed to live in at short notice (I’d got a new job and we had to move cities in 6 weeks.)
The house was too big for us really. It was a wonderful old building that had fallen on hard times, to an extent.
When we were shown around it the agent proudly boasted of the gas fire in the lounge and the wood burner in the dining room. On the day we moved in, he told us they were both condemned after safety checks.
After a period of rain, large damp patches would appear on various walls. I huffed and puffed about it but the landlord didn’t want to pay for major repairs and kept stalling.
It was fun living in a place with so much space and overflowing character. You could walk around the house and wonder what remarkable lives had been led within its walls over the generations.
I used to look at that huge log burner, with the massive brick chimney above it, and wish we could light it, especially on winter days when it seemed to be colder in the drafty house than outside.
That chimney may not have been useable to us, but for the local bird community the stacks…
