BAT ZAPPED IN VILLAGE LASER LAB

A bat has been treated with a laser in Haddenham, and the village has decided this is the most exciting sentence available to it this year.

The facts, such as they are, resist all attempts to make them sinister. A serotine bat, one of the largest species in Britain, was found on a kerb some distance away with a broken forearm. It was brought to Tiggywinkles, the wildlife hospital on the edge of the village, where the fracture was pinned, the bat was given pain relief and antibiotics, and laser therapy was applied to help the wing heal. Vets there have said they will begin test flights once the wing is strong enough, and return the bat to the place it was found. Tiggywinkles has been doing this since 1978 and gets through roughly thirteen thousand animals a year, which is about thirty-five a day, every day, including the day you were born and the day you will finally sort out the loft.

None of which has slowed anybody down. By Wednesday afternoon the phrase "village laser lab" had taken hold in the Co-op queue, where a man explained to a woman who had not asked that lasers are "not a treatment, they are a signal", and then bought four tins of chopped tomatoes with the air of a man preparing for something.

"I'd just like to know who authorised the beam," said Doreen Mapp, who keeps bees off Churchway and describes herself as open-minded to a fault. "And before you say it's a very small beam, so was the first one."

The disappointment, for anyone hoping for more, is that laser therapy is dull. It is a light held against a wing to encourage tissue to get on with it. There is no glow, no hum, no slow rise of synthesiser music. The bat does not go green. It simply lies there being extremely small and extremely delicate, held by people who have done this thirteen thousand times a year since the late seventies and have long since stopped finding it remarkable, which is the saddest and best thing about expertise.

The hospital's stated hope is to have the bat back in the wild where it was found, and there is an outside chance it will still be a patient over Halloween, which is the only genuinely spooky detail in the whole business and nobody has picked up on it. A village capable of inventing a laboratory out of a hospital ought to be able to notice a bat convalescing through Halloween, but there we are. We are not a serious people. We are, however, a people with a wildlife hospital that mends bat forearms, and on balance that is a better thing to have than a conspiracy.