How I Spent Forty Minutes Chasing A Water Dragon Out Of My House

That’s really the whole story, but let’s see if I can expand it a little.

Today is Brisbane’s worst possible weather: the threat or promise of a storm later and a southerly change for tomorrow, but in the interim such a high degree of humidity that you perspire just sitting still.

I’d been doing some washing up with both the front and back doors open, and when I walked out into the living room, I startled a small, skittery water dragon who’d obviously wandered in through the front door—at least, I’d like to think I’d have spotted him if he’d come in the back door and had to run past me.

This initiated a most entertaining forty minutes, in which he persistently ran past the invitingly open front door.

The real fun was when he ran into the main bedroom.

Twice.

Here, for example, is a composition I call “Terrified Water Dragon In My Dirty Linen Basket”:

(In my own defense, I’d been trying to get him out for twenty minutes by this point, and thought, “Sod it: I may as well get a blog post out of it.” He’s much smaller than the dragon who normally stars on this blog, so it was harder to get a clear photo on zoom, unfortunately.)

But the most entertaining part of the afternoon is expressed in this photograph, which I call “Terrified Water Dragon Who Stupidly Ran Into My Wardrobe”:

To cut a long story slightly shorter, we managed (after chasing him out of the bedroom the second time—he’d managed to squeeze under the shut door—and moving half the furniture in the living room) to induce him to hare out the front door.

Unfortunately, now we’re compelled to keep the front and back doors tightly closed in the hottest part of the day.

Stupid dragon.