I am sitting in an empty cottage listening to the silence that pools in the small rooms and hidden niches.
Outside the village is darkening quickly. Occasionally you can hear laughter from the pub, but for most of the time it feels like I am the only person in the world.
This is a small cottage and most of the time I am on my own. A few times a week the landlady, with whom I lodge, makes an appearance and then the cottage feels comfortably full. It is hard to believe that this little house for much of its life would have had a family of seven or eight people living in it.
I quite like being alone here. Lying in bed at night I can sense the rooms above and below me, I know their dimensions and contents. I can walk through the house without leaving the room.
Of course when I do that, I realise that I am not alone.
This is a house of spiders. I was verging on arachnophobia before I arrived here but after a couple of months it was just too much effort. Now I find them fascinating. Each room has at least one, regularly having to re-spin their web due to my dusting.
On the edges of the cottage and kept at bay by a complex sonic exclusion system are the mice. Before we introduced the grid, they let us know they were here by seeking out bars of soap and dragging them across floorboards.
The temporary residents are the beetles and moths who come in from the garden and have to be removed and asked politely not to return.
Last but not least, hidden in the eaves of the house are the sparrows. When the house was renovated, the builders made sure to leave an access point and the little birds didn’t need asking twice.
They live, love, squabble in the gutter, raise their young and wake me early in the morning. They fly straight at the window and then pull up at the last-minute and disappear from view. They chide me when I am searching for my keys outside the door and hop around the kitchen door hopefully in winter. If I listen carefully in spring, I can hear the chicks at feeding time.
Oh and then there are the human neighbours…
So am I never really alone in this house and that suits me fine.
The whimsical world of a girl called Tom 
Hello :) I’ve found you!
I miss living in a cottage in the middle of nowhere. In my current apartment all I can hear are the squeaks of the person living above me. Not as romantic as sparrows!
I have to say that they are my favourite, they are such lovely birds. I lived in London for years and barely saw any. I love being surrounded by them now, they regularly make my day.
You lost me at spiders. I can’t stop thinking about the buggers now.
Sparrows are FAR less scary. :)
Sorry about the spider thing!
The sparrows are endlessly hilarious. There is one who spends his whole time just sitting awkardly on a bit of cable that runs under the eaves of our neighbours house. He looks just like Chris Moyles… hmm maybe I have been living in the sticks for too long.