Not feeling very well today sorry to say. I am a bit of a hypochondriac truth be told, but I have dragged myself out of my pit to scribble this round up of a fairly non eventful week for you. So if I havn’t already lost you, how about this for a double dose of ridiculousness.
A couple of weeks ago I bumped into a friend who has received these hapless Friday missives of mine for over 10 years now poor thing. “At last” he told me, with a degree of smugness whilst at the same time managing to flatter me with faint praise, “I have an even more ludicrous story about one of my children than you normally come up with about yours”. I was all ears. It was indeed an excellent one involving his son rowing down a river with an air-rifle using a water melon floating ahead of him for target practice and suddenly finding himself the target of various police marksmen dangling from a helicopter which appeared above him. It has a happy ending. They missed. No I made that bit up. Police arrived on the bank of the river, took temporary custody of the rifle and had a gentle word in the ear for my friend’s son before returning said rifle into the hands of his 13 year old sister back at their home. Even allowing for the slightly lame conclusion I have to say I was pretty impressed and ( I was talking about my competitive streak just last week wasn’t I) I thought to myself this would indeed take some beating.
But then I caught up with Hen earlier this week. As ever with Hen, you may recall the story about the stray ferret which appeared on her bedroom floor in the middle of the night, her insouciance is almost as remarkable as the events that happen to her. I hadn’t had much communication with her for a while partially because she had lost her phone for a week.
“Oh yes…forgot to tell you…..a slightly whacky story Dadda” she said. I grimaced and braced myself.
She is currently living in New Cross which is apparently a district in South-East London. She has discovered a special feature of the otherwise mundane house in which she rents a room. She found a way up onto the roof where for several weeks now, in between photography jobs and working in a café, she has been able to while away the hours enjoying our Indian Summer doodling and doing art work and with a terrific and relatively tranquil view across the roofs of the city. See attached photo. So there she sat, the other day, thus engaged when she was irritated to be disturbed by a police helicopter that appeared and hovered directly above her. She would have stayed and watched developments, but at about the same time it started raining so she quickly packed her things up and went back down to her room. Aware that the helicopter was still in situ she out the window to see at least four police patrol cars and an ambulance gathered on the A2 in front of the house, lights flashing and the traffic at a grinding halt. Just another day in New Cross she thought until, to her surprise, she realised one of the policeman was pointing directly at her; “locked on” was how she described it. Moments later there was a pounding at her front door and five “enormous” policemen barged in demanding to know why she had been on the roof and, somewhat bizarrely, why she had come down. Er…it started to rain. Enough already. You’ve got it. Someone had phoned emergency services assuming that being on the roof could only mean she was going to jump off. Nice of them to care but what is it with all these helicopters?? And why can’t I have a normal daughter?!
Talking of normal, Bob was home last weekend. Tally – 6 grey squirrels. Prince Charles would be proud of him.
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