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Another weirdly nothingy post-Fringe post-holiday day, where I once again failed to book anyone for RHLSTP.
I enjoyed taking Wolfie on the first long dog walk I’ve done in a month. We passed a badger at the side of the road who had sadly passed away and clearly some time ago. Wolfie went up to sniff what looked like a bit of leather and then I saw the stripy face, melting away to reveal snarling badger teeth. They weren’t snarling. The skin had just receded. This badger had been lying here, by a road that is also basically a walk way for a couple of weeks at least. I don’t know what it is about Hertfordshire that they don’t clear away their dead badgers. It reminded me of the one I used to pass every day when I first moved here. I wonder what happened to him. No sign of him five years on.
I hope there is a badger heaven for these guys. It seems unfair if the only animals that get everlasting life are humans. I am not saying worms should get in, come on, but a badger has surely evolved far enough for an eternal existence of happiness.
It is crazy that it’s five years since we moved here. We had owned the house for a few months, but it was post Edinburgh Fringe that we attempted to move back here, a month before Ernie was born, with a new confused dog and a house that was far from ready, because the men who’d promised to have it all ready by the end of April and then May and then July and then definitely by the time we got back from Edinburgh and then in time for the new baby and then not actually until the following January and then pretty much everything they did turned out to be shoddy and wrong and in some cases lethally poisonous.
So I guess it’s good, five years on, that we were still here. Some more efficient workmen turned up while we were away to repair two of the things that those original idiots had messed up - a light fitting in the hallway that was positioned in a place where it was actually impossible to change the bulbs unless you prepared to stand on a bannister and lean out over a significant drop and a tank for the boiler that was facing the wrong way so it was impossible to access anything if you needed to make repairs and which was apparently borderline illegal, but gave the new decent engineers quite the surprise and allowed them to pontificate on how this had been allowed to happen (these are the good guys - the hot water wasn’t working when we got back and our new guy came out first thing the next morning to sort it out).
The house doesn’t seem to want to kill us any more and the ghosts have quietened down so I think we have been accepted. But come on. We can’t have spent five years here. That unborn baby can’t be a crazy almost five year old, the sweet shitting puppy can’t be this huge monstrous, but faithful and loving dog. I know two of those years got swallowed in the virus times, but the last few years feel like drawings on the corner of the pages of the book that someone just flicked through and then laughed at the comical story that unfolded.
Book ended by two melting badgers.
My niece and her partner arrived this evening, as we’re going to a family gathering in Bristol tomorrow. Somehow she is 31 years old now, which is weird because she was basically zero when I met her. I was 24 then. And still am. Explain that one science.
