Critters

Living in a place with a garden has been a bit of a revelation in terms of Australian flora and fauna. Mainly the fauna - we have some lovely flora, but I'm sure I will kill them all by the end of our tenancy, as is my wont.

I think that the heavy rains over Christmas have caused a general problem with mosquitos in Sydney, but am not quite sure why a cloud of them live outside our front door. I got bitten in the time it took me to get the key into the lock this morning.

We let off some cockroach bombs before we moved in, so after an initial flurry of activity, they seem to have gone to live somewhere else. Nimby? Moi?

The more "interesting" life in the garden was a redback spider in our front courtyard. The man of the house was duly despatched to whack it a few times with a shoe, returning only to say that he couldn't see a dead redback, but that there was not much left where the web had been and a few black bits and pieces around the stairwell. Very reassuring.

I have been killing the local ants with gusto and Mortein powder, but the most interesting visitor to date was a little lizardy gecko thingie. It turned up in the kitchen on a hot day when everything had been open. Terrified of a small child pointing at it and yelling "Out you go" loudly, it froze to the spot and acquiesced to her demand. Alice bade it "Goodnight Lizard" as it scuttled off into the garden.

So no real fears on the lizard score. Alice is oblivious to the ants, claps loudly in the vicinity of any fruit flies and has perfected the Aussie salute with the "blowies". However, given her current obsession with a Lydia Monks book about spiders and how they dance and ride in a supermarket trolley "Just like Alice", I would still rather have actually seen the body of the redback.