Oliver and Mark have been having a Boys Day Out.
That is to say, they have had a day at the farm together, doing things that they like to do together.
They both put their boiler suits on this morning and buzzed off with the dogs.
They spent the day doing happy man things like teaching Oliver to drive, and letting off the explosives that Number One Son-In-Law kindly gave to Oliver for Christmas, and pretending to be snipers with Oliver’s crossbow. We can also can be grateful to Number One Son-In-Law for the crossbow, who, it must be said, knows exactly what boys like. After that they combined it all by playing at drive-by shootings, where they took it in turns to drive the car past the dummy whilst the other one leaned out of the window and shot it with the crossbow.
I was curious to know how they got on with the crossbow, because in my story somebody has got to shoot a crossbow, and I wondered how difficult it would be. It turns out that they did quite well at shooting their practice dummy, which you will no doubt have spotted as the rather gruesome illustration at the top of the page, and better still, managed to avoid the dogs completely.
I am very glad that they have had such a lovely time, and equally glad that I did not have to go with them. I spent my Tuesday hoovering up the mess in the living room and hanging up washing. I enjoyed this much more than I would have enjoyed being driven around the fields by Oliver and throwing explosives at a dummy made out of Mark’s rag collection. Mark videoed the explosives. I am glad I missed that bit, because you had to light the end and then either throw them, or drop them and run away, and sometimes my inner Health and Safety officer just gets the better of me.
Instead I had a very happy Valentine’s day eating home made maple syrup and almond bread in front of the computer, washed down with enormous pots of tea, whilst I considered being a prisoner in the Tower of London in my story.
If anybody ever checks my internet use they will find all sorts of troubling things. Today my browsing history would reveal that I have been trying to find out how shackles worked on a prisoner in the days before handcuffs.
This was difficult to find, because all websites I tried seemed to be in favour of the leopard skin and pink feather variety, which was not at all what I was trying to investigate, even on Valentine’s day. They made me feel quite embarrassed to be even looking at them, never mind ordering a pair that you would hope would turn up in a plain brown envelope, and I hoped rather fervently that the police would never have occasion to investigate the contents of my computer.
I found out what I needed to know in the end, which was how quickly handcuffs could be put on to a prisoner. For the curious, quite easily, and the website recommended an agreed safe word.
I had not arranged a safe word for my character, who is still stuck in the handcuffs even now, and will be there until I get some peace and quiet tomorrow, I expect.
Oliver and Mark and the dogs came home in the end. They ate a great deal, and Oliver decided that he had had enough of staying up late, and cleaned his teeth and went to bed early.
We came out to work, because it is Valentine’s day. We do not bother about Valentine’s Day, other than as an opportunity for some profiteering. Mark says that this is because we are pirates in our inner souls. In any case neither of us have the smallest inclination to waste any of the said profits on cards with poorly scanning poetry and illustrations of teddy bears, and we didn’t.
We went to work instead.
