Remains of ancient oil jars photographed by a camera lowered into a cave somewhere in the Middle East?

Nope. Each is hardly much bigger than my thumbnail and they are made of mud, by potter wasps. All found during a spring clean of my house.

You never know what you’ll find inside your home in the tropics. Apart from the ubiquitous roaches and other sundry insects, I have — over the years in this house — found the following either inside or on the verandah:

• Cobras, grass-green whip-snake,
• house rats, some kind of native rat with a white belly, shrews, house mice, plantain squirrel,
• treeshrews (which is not a rodent),
• three foot monitor lizards, common house geckoes (chichak), another larger gecko with reddish spots,
• common palm civets,
• oriental magpie robin, yellow-vented bulbul, white-throated kingfisher, pied fantail, white vented myna,
•  scorpions, centipedes including the long-legged centipede, millipedes,
• crickets and grasshoppers, jewel beetles, click beetles, longhorn beetles, rhinoceros beetles, moths larger than my hand,
• bats,
• frogs (including treefrogs), horned toads,
• earthworms, blindworms (not sure what the correct name is),
• spiders (including jumping spiders, and a huntsman carrying around twenty thousand babies that ran off in twenty thousand different directions)
• monkeys — macaques and also leaf monkeys (neither inside the house but up on the roof),
• neighbourhood cats of all colours and sizes…

I think I’ll stop there.