Most of the furniture at my place is inbuilt.It is mostly full of books.Rows and rows of them.Old ones,new ones,on just about any subject.My family hoards them.So about five years ago,I noticed a strange sound from a book cupboard as I passed it, this faint pitter-patter, a bit like when you tap your nails against a wooden surface,only much fainter.You could probably hear it only in the dead of night or really early in the morning, it was that faint..Anyhow, after much standing against cupboards with ear pressed to them, my fam decided, much to my indignation that I was imagining it, our furniture was not really murmuring.
That is, until the day we came home to find one of the doors of one of the book cupboards collapsed.And rows of old books in it stuck together with some sort of soil like goo.It was official.Our house was infested by termites.Rows and rows of books were taken out,glued to each other ,their pages weirdly fused together with whatever it is that termites produce.They were put in the verandah where they lay for a while before being thrown away, because of the emotional attachment, Some of them were only partially damaged, I mean you could still open them, though they were falling apart at the spines.In fact I saw one ,lying in the verandah in a metallic container the other day.I have no idea why it is there (eccentric fam) .It looked so out of place ,open at a page about a fungal disease, in a metallic container which had last night's rain water in it.So I clicked a photo.
Oh and also ,the eccentric family tried to salvage the dying furniture by injecting turpentine into it.I mean literally injecting , with a big needle and syringe. Hahaha. Didn't help.
