Friday 13th July, 2012

Bob got back from Rugby last Friday for the summer holidays and much as I was looking forward to seeing him again the joy did not last long. An hour at most. It had been a long and stressy week as I think I told you. After supper I slumped in front of the TV. Moments later Bob arrived looking uncharacteristically frazzled to tell me that our next door neighbour, with whom I had had no contact whatsoever in the five years we have lived at our house, wanted to see me, adding that he had shot a pigeon with an air-rifle which had then fluttered over the substantial dividing wall into the neighbours garden. Talk about irate. The guy was apoplectic and ordered me into his house for a serious dressing down. Apparently he had been sitting in his conservatory enjoying the peace and tranquility of our Suffolk village when a bird landed on his lawn followed immediately by a boy wearing camouflage trousers, vaulting the wall and proceeding to dive on the hapless pigeon. I could see from the large pile of feathers strewn over the guys garden that he was probably telling the truth. I apologised profusely of course. His point that if his wife had been home alone she would have been terrified by this intrusion was well made. But funnily enough the thing he seemed most preoccupied by was the fact, he told me, that Bob had been barefooted. I think he considered this was a signal of some much more malicious motive beyond putting a poor bird out of its misery. I assured him - as you already know - that this was completely normal behaviour. Recall that he once ran two miles to the local railway station, caught a train to Cambridge and onto an appointment with his orthodontist with no shoes on. Fair play to the neighbour, though slightly to my surprise, he calmed down, even seeming to view me with some sympathy I felt. PS Otherwise engaged, Bob had missed supper so whilst I patched things up with the neighbour he rattled off a bite to eat for himself. The pigeon having been left behind in the furore next door, he settled instead on "poaching" an egg in the sauce of a can of baked beans which he emptied into a saucepan. Haute cuisine. PPS Went to a friends 40th birthday party last night. How cool am I to have friends that young?