ENEMIES

I poked my nose outside the door the other evening.

I know! Amazing, isn’t it?

I hope that I haven’t shocked you too much with this astounding revelation. Some things in life are considered fundamental and unchanging (although few of them actually are), and one of the absolute cornerstones of the universe is that little old me never, ever, ever goes out of the house unless he absolutely can’t get away with not doing so. Empires may topple, suns may turn supernova, but I’ll parked upon my sofa goggling at that life-sucking box in the corner.

You can count on it.

Or, at least, you thought you could... because, this is something that I rarely do any more, not unless I have to go to the station to pick up the beloved after a late evening of matters work related or am on the way home from a supermarket or a familial visit, so it came as quite a pleasant surprise to find myself outdoors as the sun was disappearing behind the hills and the air was full of that pleasant warmth that you only get at precisely this point of the year and at that time of the evening.

There was a reason, of course, and a pretty mundane one at that. You might have thought it must have been some kind of major event of an earth-shattering nature to detach me from my sofa or my keyboard at around about 8 o’clock in the evening, but it really wasn’t. The last episode of “Bones” on the particular rental disc we were watching had finished and, because this had become a house of disease, there was going to be no reason for me to pass a postbox for a couple of days, and so I thought I might as well parcel the thing up and stroll down to the local posting box and get the thing sent back.

Well you do have to get your money’s worth, don’t you?

Actually, someone should do a study on “online DVD rental anxiety” one day. You might recognise the feeling yourself. That desperate need to watch the disc as soon as is possible, no matter what else you may have planned to do that evening, and no matter how late it finishes and how tired you are, just so you don’t have the thing for longer than you really need to and reduce the number of potential discs per month that you receive.

Perhaps that is just me then…

While they’re at it, someone should also try to explain why Dr Temperance Brennan, the main character in “Bones” is supposed to be a best-selling author of thrillers, and yet seems to be unable to understand the most basic of human interactions and emotions, and has virtually no knowledge of popular culture. I may not know masses about popular thrillers, but I know that those are the two things they seem to be chock full of.

But I digress.

The neighbours were outside, sitting on their bench and watching the bats fly in and out of the eaves of my house. They greeted me as if I was an old friend. Either that or they were in total shock at seeing me outdoors at that time of the night and didn’t know quite what else to do. I even replied to them and engaged in a bit of banter, making some obscure Bela Lugosi reference about “the children of the night” which probably goes a long way towards explaining why I don’t go out much.

I forgot their names, of course, but then I’ve always been utterly hopeless when it comes to remembering names. Introduce me to half a dozen people sitting around a dinner table and the first one will already have faded away as the second one is leaving your lips, and a whole evening of social angst will unfold as I try really hard to remember the name of anyone there and who they are referring to when they mention someone else.

And yet I know who Bela Lugosi is. Go figure.

We chatted for a few moments about the bat colony and they wondered whether I could train the bats to help me to defeat my enemies. I told them one of the fundamental truths of my life, that I’m really not interesting enough to have enemies, and, as they tried to process that particular nugget, I bid my farewells and headed on down towards the pub, which is where the local postbox is.

As I reached the postbox the moon was just a slight silver sliver hovering just above the horizon in the last bleached out sunlight of a dying day. A new moon. It looked beautiful and I realised that I hadn’t actually seen the moon for quite some considerable time lately what with all the cloud and rain and sleep and suchlike, and that I’d rather missed it. Perhaps, I ventured, this prolonged absence was because it was remaining low on the horizon and hidden behind the trees and hills, but it was nice to have it back. The warmth and the sounds and the smells of the pub drifted across the warm twilit evening, the odd sleepy bird still chirruped in the trees as they turned to silhouette, the occasional bat flittered by against the darkening sky, and I felt positively chipper as I turned to head back up the hill and homeward, thinking that this was almost the perfect time of the year to be out and about and that I really should do it more often.