On Bats and Their Relevance to Bladders.

I was watching a pair of bats flying around the side of my house at twilight this evening when I noticed something small and round ascending slowly through their flight path. It soon became obvious that it was a spider climbing a length of spider silk and heading for an old TV aerial still attached to the wall at about half the height of the sloping roof. When the spider reached the aerial, it walked along the top until it disappeared from view. At no time did the bats attempt to catch and eat it.

And then the questions came flooding in: Do bats not eat spiders? If not, why not? Do some bats eat spiders, while other bats don’t? Do bats generally eat some sorts of spiders, but not other sorts? Should I consider investigating this question, and if so, how? Do I really want to know this? Do I really need to know this? If I do investigate, will that make me an anorak? If I don’t, will it carry the unwelcome whiff of either laziness or apathy?

This is all to do with having an enquiring mind, you see, and I came to the conclusion that having an enquiring mind is not dissimilar to having a full bladder. They both become uncomfortable when they’re stretched to the limit. So what to do about it?

Well, it seems to me that there are two ways of dealing with a full bladder: you can either empty it or you can stop drinking so it never gets full. The same is, therefore, true of an enquiring mind: I can either stop asking questions or I can write them up as a blog post. I chose the latter. Bye.