CASUALTIES OF WAR

One of the more unfortunate casualties of the recent incursion into our home of our tiny interloper and our subsequent declaration of war against the little blighter, and after which we did the - admittedly long, long overdue - de-clutter and chucking out of the rubbish and "contaminated" stuff, was my mother's last birthday card to me, written in a very shaky hand during the summer of 2013, in which she took a moment to thank me for everything I'd done (Which is, incidentally, to my eyes at least, not very much at all, but there you are).

In the normal, everyday world, of course, this sort of thing would have been chucked out long ago, but with my tendency to over-sentimentalise things and just pile them up to be dealt with later, a dusty pile of old birthday cards can occasionally gain an undue importance in the great scheme of things as they sit there, unremembered and not bing thought about until long after they ought to.

After all, these things are just "stuff" after all, and the real thought mattered when it mattered and it's the memories that really count, don't you think, and not the bits and pieces surrounding them…?

Of course, it was those very bits and pieces that made me think about it that afternoon, of course, and the wrenching sense of guilt as that particular card joined all the others in the black bin bag will stay with me a while, I suspect, along with my wonder that our councils insist upon us using such bags even though they rip and tear for the simplest of reasons.

I looked at the pile of bags that our suddenly very necessary clear out had created and wondered whether the bin men would take any or all of them, given that we might have exceeded our fortnightly "quota"…? I had, of course, miscalculated which collection week it was the previous week and accumulated more outside already than were strictly necessary, but our post-apocalyptic cleansing seemed to have created some kind of a mountain of the blessed things. I suspected that I might just be making a trip to the tip the following weekend when I ought really to be attacking phase two of that very same clear out.

The "mum" thing was a very poignant moment, however, and, along with some of the other "precious things" that had to be discarded as "casualties" our our own private little war, it did serve to remind me that having stuff brings with it the responsibility of looking after that stuff, otherwise things like this will continue to happen. I already suspect that my precious collection of old comics that languish in an as-yet unreachable dark corner of the attic will no doubt already be lost to the unseen marauders, which will cut me to the very quick given that some of that was being "sort of" counted upon for my retirement fund.

Meanwhile, I've noticed that, instead of it getting easier, it's felt far, far tougher this Christmas than last to be completely without parents as I now am. Somehow, I suppose, I'd rather expected last Christmas to be tough, and so it proved less tough than I imagined it would be, but with time being allegedly such a great healer, and this being another year on, I think that I had come to believe that it would be a breeze, so, rather naturally, it turns out not to be.

This year, however, I suddenly find myself looking around for my little rituals and routines and finding that they're simply not there and, whilst I was never the biggest fan of the season, I'm finding that I really am starting to miss all of those daft little annoyances which both got in the way of and contributed to yet another disappointing Festive Season for me.

Hang on to your memories, my friends, because sometimes they're all that you're left with.

"SAFARI SO-GOODY"

Christopher Biggins used to say that (every bloody week) on the early 1980s children’s game show “On Safari” when I was at an age when I should have known better than to watch it.

I know! Wretched isn’t it?

That game show also introduced the wider viewing public to Gillian Taylforth, so it’s got an awful lot to answer for, but it’s my own fault for daring to venture across to “The Other Side” for my televisual treats instead of sticking to good old “Auntie” like I ought to have done.

The BBC had a far more “respectable” approach to the whole topic of safaris as witnessed by this magazine I found in a box recently, a publication commemorating the “Blue Peter Royal Safari” as taken by the then Princess Anne and Valerie Singleton way, way back in 1971.

Nowadays, I’m sure that WHSmith would use some sort of ghastly bastardisation of the language and refer to it as a “Bookazine” but back then, despite the stiffness of its covers, it was still a plain old-fashioned “magazine” and would have set you back the Princ(ess)ly sum of 30 “new pence” or “six bob” in old money…

We had, after all, only just been “decimalised…”

(Some of us never really got over it…!)

So, is it worth an absolute fortune, now then…?

Sadly not.

AbeBooks have got a couple going for about four quid, so it was hardly an investment, but it was interesting to look through, especially when you get to this page towards the end when you see two young women walking along the seashore in, what might seem to the casual observer, an ever-so-slightly “raunchy” manner and you have to remind yourself just who it is that you’re looking at as they’re strolling along the sand in their swimwear looking as if they haven’t a care in the world.

I nearly “met” Princess Anne once, you know. I did “meet” one of her security officers who didn’t seem all that pleased with me, I can tell you…

I was in Bristol and was trying to get past the theatre where a crowd had gathered and blocked the pavement. Being just a tiny, weeny bit drunk at the time I decided that I wasn’t going to go around the crowd, and I wasn’t going to hang around waiting for it to go away…

No way…!

I was going to go through it…

And I decided to do it just as H.R.H. emerged from the front door of the theatre…

Oh, we can laugh about it now, but at the time it was… perfectly all right, actually…

Originally written for "MAWH - Light Under A Bushel" July 5th, 2012 but not published.

BISCUITNESSIE

A relatively long time ago (well, last September) in another place, I wrote about the rather bonkers graphics that I’d noticed on a box of Viennese biscuits which I’d been bought…

http://m-a-w-h.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/this-means-nothing-to-me.html

Well, a few weeks later on, as we moved into our brand spanking new offices, our beloved leader bought us a box of biscuits to celebrate our new lives, full of hope and fresh starts. (and look how well that turned out), and lo and behold it was another example from that very same range and those bonkers M&S designers (“These are not just designers…”) had been up to their old tricks again, only this time they were doing their “stereotyping thing” to dear old Scotland.

I mean there’s a “tartanish” pattern to the background which might be enough to fool the tourists, and there’s a ghostly thistle lurking behind the biscuit with the thistle moulded into it, but things start to get really bonkers when you’re putting tartan hats on your biscuits and pretending that Nessies humps are made up of biscuity goodness.

Come to think of it, unless I’m very much mistaken, perhaps “goodness” really isn’t the word when it comes to shortbread. “Tastiness” might be more appropriate. My clogged arteries and expanding waistline are testimony to the fact that I’m more than a little partial to the odd biscuit or twelve, but I’d never place “All Butter Shortbread”, Scottish or otherwise, at the “healthy” end of the foodstuffs range.

Still, with each biscuit “only” containing 100 calories and taking up a mere 5% of your recommended daily amount, you can eat at least twenty of them before you have to start considering that you might have, perhaps, “overdone” it, which would mean that you still had ten left for tomorrow, and, as long as you didn’t eat anything else, well only 34% of that particular day’s food intake would actually have been butter and only 8% would have been actually “fat” so… Result!

After all, it’s hardly the same as eating a deep-fried Mars bar, is it…?

They are also mostly wheatflour, which (I presume) means that they’ve got wheat in them and, well, wheat’s pretty healthy stuff, isn’t it? All those breakfast cereals seem to think so, and wheat also grows in the ground which means that it’s “natural” and, if you squint your eyes shut, you might even mistake it for vegetable matter and be able to count it towards your “5 a day…”

So anyway, back in September, after the biscuits had all been munched, I slid the empty box into my desk drawer and promptly forgot all about it until last week when I was sorting through my things in preparation for our imminent “great return” to the fun palace, and I found it there, so I brought it home to show you in these little “show and tell” pieces I seem to be doing at the moment.

Okay, you might think it takes a particular brand of lunacy to hang on to the packaging for a box of biscuits we ate at work for all these months but I remember thinking at the time we received our little gift that the packaging seemed to have a familiar hand behind it, and the story of their ongoing madnesses just needed to be told.

Time for a biccy, I think.

I’ll just put the kettle on…

Originally written for "MAWH - Light Under A Bushel" July 8th, 2012 but not published.

HOLIDAY MEMORIES

I used to have a stone - or rather a small pebble - in my desk drawer which I picked up on a beach in Sicily once upon a long ago, or 2002 as you might like to call it...

Every so often, on the truly awful days in that old place where I used to work (of which there were many) I would rummage around in that drawer, grab a hold of that pebble and try to use it to remember where I was at the moment I picked it up, and do my very best to transport myself back to that happier place and time, of sunny days, warm beaches and better company.

Somewhere in the house, gathering dust, I also have a tiny piece of lava picked up on Mount Etna during that same trip which, unfortunately, reminds me of the elderly Liverpudlians who complained bitterly of the coldness up near the summit and maintained "Dat dey didden tell us nut'un" even though the rest of the party, the ones who actually listened to what was being said, were all wrapped up and toasty-warm in their jerseys and anoraks or whatever cold-weather gear they'd happened to take along for their week in the sun.

The lump of lava, therefore, gathers dust and cobwebs, I think somewhere on the little shelf above the fireplace, for the memories it triggers are not so warm as being at the top of an active volcano ought to suggest, and so it hasn't ever been used as a fond memory trigger or stress reliever. It remains what it is, just a tiny fragment of lava of some small geological interest and, whilst it does still serve as a reminder to me of that angry mountain and its almost primeval connection to the very bowels of the Earth, it has never managed to become one of the magical transports to my "happy place..."

Of course, some people argue that surrounding yourself with "stuff" like this speaks volumes about some deep psychological need, and is just the kind of thing that triggers the hoarding instinct when you can't bear to part with any parts of your past simply because you cannot take yet  another loss, however minor, in your life.

This, of course, may have a lot of truth in it, and the significant losses in my life did come at "difficult" times and have left me feeling vulnerable (for want of a better word), but I am also a bit of a "collector" too... so I do spend far too much time surrounded by "stuff" that other people might regard as "bits of old tat..."

Anyway, this summer, as we walked through Newborough Forest, we stopped for a moment in a peaceful clearing, and the Beloved bent down and picked up a small fir cone she'd spotted, and handed it to me, telling me to hang on to it and, when things get difficult at work, to try and use it to remember that quiet moment amongst the trees on that bright, relaxing summer's afternoon, and remind myself that things aren't always quite that bad.

And, do you know what...?

She's absolutely right.

It works.

STABLE

The situation with my mother is always a matter of dealing with both the unknowable and the great unknown. It remains complicated despite being very simple; At some point she will be required to return home and she will expect that I will be the person who is able to deliver her there. Meanwhile, lengthy lists of things that she thinks ought to be done are being composed in her mind alongside the huge disappointment of the fact that I don't spontaneously think of doing them myself. There's also the tricky little matter of the slight chance that she may have some kind of relapse, or be unable to cope, or have a thousand and one little reasons to contact me at precisely the wrong moment, expect me to drop anything and everything that I am doing, no matter how important that might happen to be, and come running.

This means that I am constantly on alert, constantly on edge, and seldom in a position to completely relax or try to plan to do anything. Sometimes, when things have been calm for a while, we foolishly try and take a moment to think about doing something, anything, that will help us to escape from the rut, but that's usually when, as the saying goes, all hell breaks loose...

Meanwhile, the builder rang...

We had a quote to have some work done way back in the relatively quiet month of March and then, of course, life did indeed let loose hell and here we find ourselves in August with none of it done, and living out of bags because we let the old furniture go in anticipation of this work sometime in April.

Anyway, he had, apparently, been "trying to contact me" and left "loads of messages" and wondered whether we still wanted the job actually done. Now I do work in an area where the internet and telephone connections are basically what can only be described as  "rubbish" but this seemed unlikely.

Anyway, he wondered if he could start the job imminently in the sense of "the day after tomorrow" which, quite naturally meant that we had to face the fact that our little house was suddenly going to be in for some little upheaval, especially as the "one room at a time" option we had hoped for had evolved into "both rooms at once" leaving us nowhere to shift the clutter of the one into the other for the duration...

When the builder came round on the Tuesday evening to make plans, it became abundantly clear that the short notice meant that there was little chance of us being ready for them in time and we were able to get a delay to beyond the weekend before spending the rest of our free time for the foreseeable clearing rooms and churning the junk around and finding that we were forming great big piles of stuff that would not have looked out of place on one of those "Hoarder" programmes which have become so popular lately.

Well, at least it's not just us, then...

So, we are now in a state of chaotic preparation and not exactly looking forward to living in rather bizarre circumstances for the foreseeable future, which is making us generally stroppy and stressful and full of fear and trepidation and wondering if we should just book into a B & B for the duration.

Given my mum's almost uncanny ability to exocet any of my plans whenever I have anything that needs to be done to any particular given schedule, I have taken to trying to get everything done now, which has not really helped with anyone's stress levels recently and probably doesn't help to get anything achieved any faster if I'm being perfectly honest.

All I can see, though, is time being chewed up and the fact that I've got far, far too much that still needs doing and fewer and fewer hours in which to get it all done and that, dear reader, is likely to cause the things that lurk in the dark corners of my mind to get more confident and come out of the shadows all guns blazing, so things around her could get very "interesting" for a while.

What I need, what I really, really need right now is for something to be stable, something to be dependable, something to be reliable. I need something in my life to be a calm void, to be somewhere I can escape to in my mind and get a moment of peace as the hurricane whips all around me...

But, at the moment, I really can't see that happening...

Can you...?

GRANDMA'S DRAWERS

I’ve been told recently that I have a tendency to dwell far too much in the past and that I should, perhaps, learn to get go, move on, and generally not brood upon the events of the long past, even though those same events are the ones that shaped me into the twisted and deformed creature I am nowadays, and that their effects are still resonating through me even now.

With that in mind, however, perhaps I do need to admit that it is at least possible that I’ve broken a few of my own rules recently; Simple, homespun fare like “Don’t blog angry” - stuff like that – and that the dark thoughts in my mind have been manifesting themselves in my words and twisting them in spiteful and virulent ways to make these pages a much more scary and downright hostile place to visit.

Well, it’s not for nothing that I call this a DARK corner of Lesser Blogfordshire, even though I sometimes forget the “dark” part and try to keep things light and frothy, but no-one could really ever say that they weren’t warned, and sometimes the strange mish-mash of ideas and events going on in my little world collide to produce the following smorgasbord of mixed thoughts, none of which mean much individually, but as a gestalt entity, possibly add up to slightly more…

Meanwhile, continuing with our loose recent theme of trying to let go of the past and embracing the future (what do you mean “you hadn’t noticed”…? Have you not been paying attention…?), here’s a picture of a set of drawers which I remember belonging to my grandmother back in the day. I vividly recall them sitting inside one of the fitted wardrobes in the second house my grandfather designed and built as if it was the only place they could think of putting them after they’d moved in.

The drawers used to smell of lavender and have old sheets of wrapping paper in the bottom of  each of them , presumably to protect something or other, and there’s a sheet of thickish glass cut to size that sits on the top of them to protect the surface, I suppose, although all I really remember is that they used to sandwich a doily between the two for no very good reason.

Anyway, it’s another piece of old furniture now on its way to charity as it has outlasted its usefulness in Blogfordshire Towers, but I thought that its passing needed noting.

Talking of drawers, I arrived at work the other day to find that the shutters were open, so I let myself in and busied myself with the most vital first task of the working day; boiling the kettle to make my coffee. By the time I had unpacked my stuff and was heading with my mug towards the kitchen, the shutters had been closed and I was shut inside the building, but by the time I had boiled the kettle, shoved the milk, the Instant and the hot water into my mug and was on my way back to my desk, someone else had arrived and opened them up again, none of these people having been remotely aware, I suspect, that I was busily brewing up inside.

Strangely enough, the first thought that popped into my mind after all this had been going on was “Those shutters are going up and down like a tart’s drawers this morning!” which might not be the most politically correct thought that I’ve ever had but perhaps merely proves that I watched far too much of “The Sweeney” when I was younger.

And finally, when we talk of things passing and “embracing the future”, it’s probably worth me adding the following comment which I posted in reply to someone else’s post-funeral blog after the final journey of the Baroness last Wednesday.

Whilst I was never a huge fan of Mrs T – my own thoughts upon her passing slipped almost unregarded into a particularly dark corner of Lesser Blogfordshire last week – I still think that it’s “right” and “proper” to respect the office of the Prime Minister, even if you didn’t particularly respect the person who once held that office.

After all, whilst there seem to be few who regard George W Bush as the finest President the United States ever had, you can be damned certain that, when the time comes, he’ll be seen off with all the due pomp and circumstance that that country gives to all of its former leaders, whatever their party, so why shouldn’t we do the same for ours?

MY GRANDPARENTS’ TABLE

I am, by nature, something of a hoarder. Oh, my life’s not quite got to the stage where I’m climbing over mountains of old newspapers in order to boil myself an egg (I’ve never been all that keen on eggs to be honest…) but there have been times when the occasional avalanche of tat has occurred, swiftly followed by a stream of expletives, and the feng shui in our tiny little house is never likely to exude a state of calmness and well-being.

However, in recent weeks we have come to a decision to “declutter” our little part of the world as best we can, which so far, as is perhaps the nature of such things, has led to exponential increases in the amount of clutter lying about the place as we churn it about to make space for the long-overdue building work to take place and address the damper and mouldier corners of our little hovel and try and restore harmony to at least bits of our lives.

The problem seems to be that in order to achieve this, you see, the first things that have to be got rid of are the very lumps of old furniture that a lot of the stuff was being kept in, and once you start putting your clothes into bags instead of drawers and wardrobes, the apparent clutter and sights guaranteed to make your eyes sore just seems magnified, even if it is only for a little while and that seeing it all like that reminds you that we all wear 20% of our clothes 80% of the time…

Anyway, today’s source of anxiety is that a charity are coming to whisk away the furniture that we have decide that we no longer need, and this is causing me a great deal of worry now that I’ve decided that they’re quite possibly not a charity at all, but an internet cover for some house-breaking scam and that they might bash me over the noggin and steal everything else at the same time.

Ah well, I’m sure I’ll find that out soon enough.

One of the items that I’ve finally been persuaded to part with is my grandparent’s old oak folding dining table which I’ve lived with for many years since I moved it into my little flat in the outer city back in the day.

It’s a bit huge for most of the spaces I’ve been able to afford to live in to be honest, and I ruined the surface of the centre section by watering “Ralph”, my late, lamented Boston Fern without putting a dish under it. Why I had a Boston Fern called “Ralph” is another story, which dates back to my college days and involves American exchange students not being able to take certain things back home with them and handing out bits and pieces like their plants to their neighbours before departure.

But enough about that, let’s get back to the matter in hand, namely that table. It had to go, of course, despite the fact that I worry that it’s going to turn out to be just the sort of antique that turns up on a TV “Roadshow” in a few years’ time and turns out to be worth an absolute fortune.

Nevertheless, I’ve finally come to terms with the fact that I have to let it go… but it is turning out to be something of a wrench…

(No, actually, it’s a table. If you think that’s a wrench, thank God you never became a plumber…)

But then, you see, that table has always been there. It stood in the dining room of “The Hawthorns”, the big detached house that my grandfather built in the 1950s, and it moved with then to the dining area of the bungalow which he built for their retirement in the 1970s and got to live an entire four years in before he died.

In my memory it seemed far longer.

All those family Christmases and Sunday lunches spent around the thing.

All of the laughter…

All of the rows…

They’re not always fond memories, but they are memories nonetheless.

After that house was sold and my grandmother moved into her last home, a tiny retirement apartment just down the road from us, she didn’t really have room for it, but it seemed so well made and expensive looking in comparison to anything that you could get from IKEA that it languished in our garage for a while before moving with me into my first home, and has been with me, folded and unused, ever since. Perhaps in the hope that one day it would go very nicely in the mythical “big house…”

So, you see, sometimes it’s just very difficult to bring yourself to part with things, no matter how ridiculous it might seem, because there’s an awful lot of personal history wrapped up in that old lump of carved wood.

CLUTTERBUCK

As of this morning I have 66 “drafts” and 430 or so other pages of miscellaneous blog thoughts that I’ve never actually completed or wanted to actually risk publishing for various reasons. Granted, some of those pages consist of barely one line (sometimes it’s merely one word which triggered a long-lost line of thought once upon a time), but nevertheless, that’s still an awful lot of thinking just waiting to be thunk before being flung out into the maelstrom and vigorously ignored.

Some of those postings, especially the ones which made it to the “drafts” stage but then never left, I have just never felt all that sure about. Quite a lot of them never actually got finished, and quite a few more have now been lurking around for so long that they’re really no longer even barely relevant.

So, the question now is, of course, what do I do with all that untapped nonsense…? After all, every so often I do raid it, looking for inspiration, but I seldom feel the need to polish them up to be presented to a disinterested world. Instead I get distracted by some new thought, another wild and crazy idea, or just a little bit of mind-numbingly dull introspection that means nothing at all and is just a pallid rehash of a thought I made earlier…

It’s very much like the clutter I live in at home.

Piles and piles of stuff that I’m either too lazy to sort through, or far too attached to on some level to actually throw out. I could, I suppose, decide to auction great swathes of it off, but I suspect that knowing it’s there is part of the comfort it all gives me.

It’s rather like whenever I used to lend a film to someone (back in the days when they couldn’t just download it themselves). The one thing I then wanted to watch was the one thing I no longer had to hand about the place, and I could start to get very twitchy about it.

I still have a mental tick list of the books that were never returned, no matter how much those borrowers might have tried to convince me that they’d given it back to me. Try doing that with a tenner sometine and see how well that works for you…

I also fear that, the minute I did decide to sell something off, I would then spend months trying to track down another copy, even though it had sat on a shelf untouched for years prior to the big clearout, or, perhaps more alarmingly, I might forget which precious volumes were allowed to go, and then spend weeks turning the place upside-down trying to hunt down  a particular book that is no longer there.

There is a plan for that, by the way, which (I kid you not) involves photographing the book spines before they go off to the charity shop, so that I have a “ready reference” for items that I will know not to look for…

That might seem to be utter madness, but the time and irritation it might save in the long run could prove priceless, and even life-saving, considering how totally focussed I can get about such things.

Endless hours spent churning the clutter to find the one precious nugget which popped into my brain for no very good reason, but which then simply has to be found at all costs, only to turn up in the obvious place after all.

All these problems could be solved by simply reducing the sheer quantity of clutter, but accumulating clutter and stuff and placing it on top of the older stuff like some kind of geological strata seems to be what I do with my life these days, perhaps because I believe that somehow by doing that I’m not going to allow my mind or my memory to slip away.

And now it seems that I’m doing exactly the same thing with my words, too…?

VIDEOLANCHE

A few years ago I heard a rather alarming and tragic story about the man who ended up going to prison for manslaughter because he threw the TV remote control at his partner and it hit her on the head and killed her.

Now, unfortunate though this story was, I’m not going to bother looking up the fine details and an accurate account of it because that’s not really why I have dredged it up out of my memory this morning.

There is another reason.

Yesterday, as I skipped into the bathroom to deal with one of those very few reasons why one might wish to use a bathroom, there came from outside a resounding crash which caused a certain amount of alarm for the beloved who had just seen me depart from one room heading in the very direction from where that crash had subsequently erupted.

Such is her faith in my geriatric old body that she immediately thought that I’d fallen down the stairs, and so was much relieved when I emerged unscathed from the bathroom to try and find out what was going on.

Well one of the long shelves full of videotapes had finally given in to the force of gravity and allowed a whole row of cassettes to cascade to the ground after having been held in position merely by the friction and presence of their neighbours for quite some time now.

If I ever went up to get a tape from the shelf (something that has been happening far more rarely recently I’ll admit) there was a little game which had to be played to extract one tape whilst keeping the bond of the surface tension strong enough to prevent such an avalanche, because the wood used to construct the shelves has been slowly angling itself ever more steeply over recent years.

Obviously, when I moved the vacuum cleaner minutes before I had knocked something which caused the slow slide towards catastrophe which resulted in the devastation that we found in the corridor after the crash.

And this was when I remembered the unfortunate story of the TV remote control and realised that I was rather lucky not to have been underneath this videolanche when it toppled as it really could have killed me if I’d been extraordinarily unlucky.

Death – and a “Stupid Death” at that - by analogue…

I don’t know…

Perhaps it might just have been a rather appropriate way for me to go…?


Note to self: Having carefully stacked the tapes at ground level, it is then a huge mistake to keep on falling over them in the darkness. Fool me once, shame on you... Fool me twice...

COIN SHIELD

I love this…

I just love the fact that you can do this with our coinage and am amazed it took me over four years to even notice that you can, seeing as they were first introduced in 2008.

However, my own lack of observational skills aside, I also rather like the fact that, with a little bit of careful planning and a willingness to set aside £1.88 of your small change, anyone can collect together the parts of this little jigsaw and build one for themselves.

The design itself was the winning entry in a competition run by the Royal Mint back in 2005 and was won by a Welshman called Matthew Dent whose use of the Royal Shield across the reverse of the entire set gives the coins a contemporary feel whilst linking them right back through the entire history of English coins, and got him much criticism, ironically, because the shield itself doesn’t actually contain a uniquely “Welsh” element in its design.

So, if you’re just a tiny bit bored the next time you’re in a coffee shop or on the train, why don’t you rummage through your pockets and see if you’ve got the makings of the national jigsaw game.

Go on… You know you want to…

THAT LIZARD THING (UPDATE)

After its ignominious few hours lying at the edge of the pavement, some passing stranger has lifted the mildly convincing (but ultimately obviously just a toy) lizard, which I mentioned a few days ago, up onto the top of the wall, presumably so that someone who might be looking for their lost plaything might find it easier to find.

This was, of course, not necessarily the wisest of choices because the texture of the lizard’s back does camouflage it rather well against the rocky surface upon which it now sits.

So much so, in fact, that I have completely failed to notice it was there on more than one occasion now, and muttered to myself about how someone must have picked it up, before spotting it again...

Lurking...

At around about eye-level.

In the kind of disconcerting way that still surprises the unwary passer-by (and me - for I am am a bear of very little brain with the attention span of an elderly goldfish and a memory like one of those things that you drain pasta with...) if you fail to warn them that it’s there...

“Don’t be alarmed, but...”

“Well, now I AM alarmed... What the hell’s THAT?!?”

Because it’s truly a freaky looking thing to come across when you notice it unexpectedly, looking very convincingly large-lizard-like in the half-light of the typical streetlamp, looking for all the world as if it’s about to pounce...

I’ve still not found out anything more about the hidden history of this lost and found thing, and I probably never will. Like the mysterious Captain Kirk toy that I once found in my garden as I hacked back the undergrowth, it seems destined to fall into that intriguing box of mystery of unknowable unknowns...

THAT LIZARD THING

To be honest it gave me quite a fright at first.

Perhaps I’m just very stupid or perhaps (and I prefer to think this…) I was just very tired after a long day at work, but when I spotted the creature just lying there on its back right at the edge of the pavement and within a stone’s throw of my own front door I did let out an involuntary yelp of… astonishment perhaps…?

Not fear, oh no! I’m far too proud to admit it might have been actually scary, not now that I’ve had time to think about it.

“What the hell is THAT?” my mind may have been screaming at that precise moment, but I’m still astute enough to know that it’s probably best to look twice before ringing the church bells, rounding up the villagers, lighting up the torches and marching on the Town Hall demanding action be taken.

So I looked again.

It hadn’t moved in the full ten seconds I’d been palpitating, so it seemed safe enough to do so, so I did with all the bravery of the idiot in those films who you find yourself bellowing at exasperatedly to “Run away you idiot! Why do they never just run away…?”

On closer inspection, there was something artificial-looking about the feet and I managed to unclench various parts of my anatomy when I realised that it was just a lost or discarded toy.

I’m not sure what kind of child would come to love such a strange and bizarre creature as this is, but it takes all sorts and it is rather a comfort to know that even the oddest looking creatures can find unconditional love somewhere.

Mind you, they didn’t quite love it enough not to lose it and leave it lying there in the rain… Perhaps a blind eye was being turned here…?

“Uh-oh! She’s dropped the ghastly looking thing… Keep walking, keep walking…”

After a moment more of contemplating the thing in order to just convince myself that it really was a toy and not some strange infestation of bizarrely large lizards which seemed unlikely for the brink of Lesser Blogfordshire to be perfectly honest, I unholstered my telephone and grabbed just the sort of blurry evidence that was once so very much loved by the kind of publications which claimed to have compelling evidence of Bigfoot or UFOs.

Just as another local woman walked past and wondered what it was I was taking a picture of…

“What on Earth is it…?” she asked with that fleeting yet familiar look of terror on her face which I was now, of course, able to be quite blasé about, despite having been wearing a similar one myself mere moments before.

“It’s just a toy… just a toy!” I was able to reassure her as she went on her way.

Well, I say “reassure”, but perhaps, as she headed homewards, she was possibly wondering more alarming thoughts about the strange man bothering to take a picture of such a thing than about the giant, soggy, and quite dead looking lizard creature itself which had until recently seemed so alarming to her.