During our night in Seremban, Nigel woke me up to direct my attention to some peculiar noises. Someone moving about upstairs, I wondered? Or next door? Nigel promptly fell asleep again, satisfied with this explanation, but the more I listened, the less it seemed to fit. The noise wasn't coming from upstairs or next door, but from the window. Rain, maybe? I got up to look. It wasn't raining.

I climbed back into bed, and by this time, Nigel was awake again, too, because it was becoming apparent, in a series of rapid little realizations, that not only were the noises emanating from something that was very definitely IN the room with us, but this something was winged, and was now energetically flying circuits.

We had encountered our first hotel bat...

So what do you do, at about 4.30 in the morning, with a bat who is now having conniptions, and hacking round as if he's jet-propelled?

Well, we phoned Housekeeping. To give them their due, they were very collected:

"We have a bat in our room."

"A what?"

"A flying animal."

"Oh, a bat. We'll come and deal with it."

By this time, the bat had taken up residence on the pelmet. But he didn't stay for long. While we waited for Housekeeping to assemble the requisite members of the bat team, he took to the air again, and eventually -- as had to happen, given his crazy speed -- he misjudged something, landing with a bit of a tumble behind the writing table.

This was quite handy for the three-person bat team, who arrived a couple of minutes later. They came armed with blankets, and it was a lot easier to apply the blanket method with a bat on the floor than with a bat on a pelmet. They were very gentle with him.

Obviously, by opening the curtains, I'd released the already wakeful bat. But we were on the ninth floor, for goodness' sake -- way higher than any of the neighbouring trees. So quite what his story was is hard to fathom. But I hope he's even now blogging about it to his friends and family.