Readers, I have just had a truly terrifying experience.
When I say terrifying, I do not mean terrifying in the sense that reading Jeremy Corbyn’s biography was terrifying. That has just left me shuddering with unease and relief at what a narrow escape we have had. It was merely the sort of terrifying that wakes one up in the night feeling dark shadows looming. It was not like that at all.
In this sense of the word, I mean terrifying in the sense of having jumped into the air and shrieked with horror, and then not wanted to go anywhere by myself for a little while.
I have had a day to myself, because Mark has buzzed off to work. He has gone off to build Number One Son-In-Law’s house in Barrow into a place of desirability for prospective tenants. They are trying to hurry up with this because there is a prospective tenant but the house is not yet desirable enough. It has become a Race Against Time.
Once he was gone, and I had done all the usual dog-emptying and washing-machine-filling sort of chores, I spent some time hacking back all the dead sticks in the front garden. This needed doing now so that we will be able to see the snowdrops and crocuses in a few weeks. Their tiny green shoots are already poking through, despite the iron-hard frosts, and it was quite exciting. There are some things that are too hopeful even for Government advisory committees to crush.
This took a lot of messing about, and made my trousers filthy, much to my surprise, because I had thought that everywhere would be frozen too hard to leave mud all over me, maybe my warm knees just melted it.
When I had finished I went into the house to get on with my Job Of The Day, which was to process the last of the apples. There are still a few of these left, sitting in a tub in the conservatory, and I wanted to use them up before they became unusably squishy.
I was supposed to be making jam, and chutney, and pear and parsnip soup, only using apples instead of pears, because we haven’t got any pears. It turned out that I could hardly tell the difference, so that was all right, although that might have been because since I have had bat flu I am not quite as good at tasting things. Anyway, it was just fine, and when Mark comes home we are going to have it for dinner, with hot bread rolls and coriander-and-garlic roasted chicken.
I made some biscuits as well, because I have been meaning to do this for ages.
I didn’t finish the jam, and I didn’t even start on the chutney, so that will have to be a job for another day. The jam will be interesting, because I chucked all the fruit in it that was starting to go a bit soggy since Christmas, and then, on an inspiration, added half a bottle of mulled wine that we had started drinking and then left in the conservatory and forgotten about.
The thing was that by the time I had finished it was almost dark.
It wasn’t quite dark, not entirely, but the sun had sunk long before, leaving cloudless black skies and icy, arctic stars just beginning to appear.
I had to go into the garden and empty the compost bucket, because it was full of squishy apple bits, and parsnip peelings, and onion leaves, because I had been using onions from the garden.
I could just make out the outline of the compost heap, which was very full because we have just emptied the conservatory beds. When I lifted the carpet off the top to tip the bucket into it, something underneath moved.
It was an enormous black rat, and it leaped at me.
It shot past my head, missing me by inches, and landed with a crash in the flower pots, where I could hear it frisking and bashing about.
I squeaked, very loudly, but nobody came to rescue me, so I dashed back into the house, imagining all the while that The Rat was going to chase after me and scamper over my bare feet, which obviously it didn’t.
Once I had slammed the door and hurled my back against it, gasping with the surprise of it, I stopped being frightened, because obviously a rat in the garden is not going to hurt me. There are lots of rats in Windermere because there are so many restaurant dustbins.
I thought that it might not have been black, and riddled with plague, but probably just brown like all of the others, and merely looked black because of the dark. Also it was not really jumping at my head. It was very frightened indeed, because had it come to a fight The Rat would probably have lost, not least because I have got guns and dogs and poison at my disposal. It was trying to get away by the shortest possible route, which was straight past my ear.
I thought about guns and dogs and poisons, vengefully, for a minute, because I had been scared, until I recollected that it must be fairly terrible to be a rat at the moment. I do not think that I would like to be living in a frozen hole in this dreadful bitter weather, gnawing on old apple peelings for dinner. Compared to the poor rat, my existence is charmed and blessed beyond imagining.
All the same, when I went out to the dustbin to empty the hoover, I took a torch with me and made a lot of clattering noise, in order to make sure that it was more frightened than I was.
I do not wish to renew our acquaintance.
Have a picture of our television-log-fire.
