This morning, at 2am, I was scared into waking when something soft and insistent brushed across my face. Feeling like Nick Miller in a haunted house, I startled upright in bed, fearfully looking around. The normally quiet early hours greeted me with an explosion of noise.
Storm Ellen had arrived. Or, rather, the edge of Storm Ellen. Given her destructive power in Ireland and the south-west of the UK, this was just a strong wind. Still, she was very loud.
Mind you, as strong as she blew she was unable to dislodge the artist’s arrow.
The arrow is the latest addition along the all weather path into town. The artist with the penchant for mixing up the unexpected with the every-day has added an arrow, the point sticking in a tree as if recently fired from a bow. It looks quite precarious but it remained firmly embedded regardless of what Ellen tried.
While the walk into town was windy, the threatening clouds didn’t do anything but sprinkle the world in hardly noticed dots of rain. And, given the wind, it was actually quite a pleasant trip.
The walk home was made all the more pleasant by running into the Lady of the Rescues.
I haven’t seen her for ages. We had a lovely chat about her latest charge. He’s a bit skittish and will run away in fear at the slightest provocation. He was a beautiful dog. He eventually let me pat him, after sniffing my hand of course.
We also talked about Teddy.
Teddy is an Alsatian she rescued. He was a beautiful dog and the reason why we chat. The first time I saw her, Teddy insisted on coming over and letting me pat him. She had no choice given his strength and her slight frame.
He wasn’t aggressive at all until she bought home another rescue with cancer. Teddy, for reasons known only to himself, didn’t like this latest addition to the household. She eventually had to choose between them. The new dog wouldn’t have had any chance of being adopted given the cancer, so she, painfully, had to give Teddy up.
She told me, today, that Teddy is deliriously happy with his new family in Cornwall while she still misses him a lot. We agreed that our dogs are really, really important parts of our lives.
The new dog, incidentally, gets on perfectly with the one that has cancer. And the cancer has gone for the time being but, she told me with a sigh, will return in time. So, for the time being anyway, a happy life is what she needs and is getting.
Our happy life was sorely tested today. Mirinda had an agonisingly complex spreadsheet formula to create which I couldn’t even begin to explain while I had a massive list of questions to answer regarding the sale of the cottage. By the end of a brain numbing day, we were ready for a walk in Ellen’s fierce breath.
Rather than risk the falling branches of Frensham, we headed up to Crondall.
Mirinda’s allergies have prevented us from visiting Crondall, a place that saved our lockdown sanity in the early days of The Madness. But, with the advent of fields full of wheat and pollen, we had to switch to more wooded paths. So, apart from a safety point of view, today’s walk was a revisit of a favourite place.
Of course, now the fields have been harvested, the wheat and the broad beans have gone and the pollen no longer a problem. It helped that Ellen was blowing it all away as well.
And so, we had a lovely walk, taking in the countryside, breathing in the fresh air, clearing our befuddled brains. We finished the walk with the traditional checking out of the giant shed installation. Sadly, the giant shed installation now has big shutter doors so the casual walker can no longer see the progress inside.
I should explain that the soft, unexpected caress of my face in the wee small hours, was caused by a curtain and not some ethereal and ghostly visitor.
