Bats!'

Once more the weekend arrives. There's so little to do, that I end up staying in bed until 1.30pm, only surfacing when my stomach begins to make more noise than the traffic outside. A bowl of weetabix later, and I'm reclining in front of the television, flicking around in the vain hope that something will grab my interest. Of course the day's best television was at 8am - the British and Irish Lions' first game of their New Zealand tour. But that was far too early. I shall wait until the test matches before getting up that early. If I'm lucky, the rugby club (That's the sport!) will open early, and it will be debauchery before 10am!

I know that this will happen. When England won the world cup in Australia, it started at 8.30am, and about 200 people turned up to watch it at the club. They even opened the bar at 7.30am for the early birds. As you should know, England won, and I doubt I've ever felt so much adrenaline surging through so many people at one time. By 11am, we were all on our way to getting completely smashed. How I managed to stay there until 1am the following morning I'll never know.

But I digress. There I am, watching the England dismiss Bangladesh at the cricket, when the phone rings. It's my friend Simon. He's just phoned to remind me about the bat walk later that evening. I agree to go, as it will probably be the only time I will leave the house all weekend.

We meet at a convenient location, which also happens to be a pub, where we have a meal. I'm most disappointed. I ask for gammon steak, egg and chips. What I get is thick cut ham, with egg, on top of my chips. The rest of the plate, around half, is taken up with salad. Salad!!??!? If I'd wanted half a cesar salad with my chips I'd have asked for it. My sister suggested I should have sent it back, but when you wait for an hour, you tend just to get stuck in.

After a while sitting around, relaxing and chatting, our guide Ian decides it's just about the right time to set off. So we do, and immediately I am glad I made the effort. The meadows are less than a mile from my house, yet I cannot remember ever venturing that far down, even as a child. It was wonderful wandering along the river bank at dusk, and not long before we encountered our first bat.

Ian, who works as a park ranger or something along those lines, bought with him the BatBox III. If you've seen Alien, then it's surprisingly like the motion detectors fashioned by Ash. Whereas his machine detected "micro changes in air density", this identified the frequency of the bats' echolocation signal. Strangely enough, both machines made the same noise when activated.

It was strange. You could walk along these paths, by rivers and near ponds, and never know that there were bats there. But walk around with a bat detector, and you can hear them coming, and also determine from which direction. We must have heard about 30 or so bats with the machine, and made visual contact with at least 15 or so. That may not sound so much, but believe me it was exciting.

All in all, we rambled around for about 90 minutes, the only low point being me putting my foot down a hole and twisting my ankle. Thankfully, we were not too far from our pub base, so hastened back before we got too far into the meadows.

I would honestly urge everyone to do this. It's great fun, and don't be fooled by all those films where bats get caught in your hair. That's really not the case. Remember, these little buggers are flying around dense foliage in the middle of the night, and use echolocation to guide them. They know you're there.

Go on. Treat yourself. It's an experience I want to experience again.