The Whitsun bank holiday weekend passed off so quietly it was unnerving. The weather was perfect for once, warm and sunny, which would normally have brought people to Shinglesea in droves, but it was so quiet you could have heard a pin drop. In our immediate neck of the woods our neighbour Kristy disappeared for much of the weekend, which added to the peace. I have nothing against Kristy personally, but there’s no denying that she’s an exhausting person to have around. On some fine days, when all the windows are open, her voice seems to be everywhere (usually berating poor old Owen Maddock, or tearing off a strip of some unfortunate wretch on the other end of the telephone). Sometimes I have seriously thought she would make a very effective foghorn! I hadn’t perhaps realised before how draining I found her, until I had 3 consecutive days of her absence, and I felt like a new man by the end of it!
Jason had a friend to stay, a rather doleful character who seemed to have a horrifying number of things wrong with him, and who rarely spoke except to occasionally utter a glum comment of “character-building” on any given subject. He proudly showed me his medication one day, and inwardly I wondered how the blazes he was still alive, let alone walking around and functioning! On one of the rare occasions when he did say something (other than “character-building”) he told a couple of very LONG and involved anecdotes about his travels. The gist of which (as far as I could tell before I lost the will to live) seemed to be (a) he wasn’t given very much to eat when he flew out to Corsica, and (b) the street signs in Athens are in Greek. Well I’ll go to the foot of our stairs! (Well I would if we had any).
After he had gone back from when he came at the end of the holiday, Misty irritated me by saying “character-building” again and again, just because he knew it irritated me. Kristy returned, looking suntanned but worn out … and shockingly quiet. In fact, she took to scurrying in and out of her house with her head down, like a fugitive from justice.
Meanwhile, out in the real world (if you can call it that) we had a brand new headline to worry about: “NUCLEAR THREAT”, with North Korea sabre-rattling to all and sundry. I remember saying, 6 years ago, that North Korea was the one to watch, NOT Iraq. But nobody ever listens to me.
Xanthe was still working for the Lib Dems (she hadn’t yet fallen out with them, which was astonishing), and even tried to get me to talk to two of their henchwomen. This wasn’t a good idea. I was in the middle of frying some chicken at the time, and Misty was watching something on our bedroom telly that he couldn’t possibly drag himself away from to answer the door. I was out of sorts because they rang the doorbell and then imperiously rattled the letterbox, which reminds me of the sort of intimidating thug-ish tactics used by energy salesmen.
“I’m thinking of voting Tory actually”, I said, hoping that this would exorcise them.
Not a hope.
“You do realise that the Tories want to isolate us in Europe?” one of them started (it was like listening to a religious nut) “And think what that will do to jobs and crime …”
(Actually this is a very shortened version of the spiel, I won’t bore you with the rest of it).
“Stop trying to bully me!” I shouted and shut the door on them.
Later, I drew cartoon glasses and clown make-up on their pictures on the leaflet they had pressed into my hot, sweaty little hand. Childish, but enjoyable.
And so ends the month of May, the merry [stark, staring bonkers] month of May. The month concluded with a whining e-mail from my brother-in-law, the fat slob, which proved that he had lost the plot completely.
“WHEN CAN I GET A REBATE ON GLOBAL WARMING? THIS HAS BEEN THE WORST SUMMER FOR YEARS”.
Patiently, I pointed out that it is still only May, and so Summer hasn’t’ actually started yet, let alone “been”, and that the country was currently basking in wall-to-wall (coast-to-coast) temperatures of a perfect 24 degrees centigrade. In the words of the immortal Kenneth Williams: “who is this IDIOT?!”
Although I hadn’t seen the odd couple spying on us from their car for several weeks now, this wasn’t to say that weird things weren’t still happening on a regular basis. It’s just that life was moving so damn fast that it was becoming increasingly hard to keep up with it all.
One night, in the early hours, I had got out of bed to turn down the electric fan in our bedroom. Whilst I was doing so I distinctly heard a man’s voice (young-ish sounding) exclaim “hello!” in a very jaunty manner quite nearby. So close in fact that he could have been standing right at my shoulder. Incredible as it may sound, this didn’t unnerve me at all. It may be simply that whoever-it-was sounded too friendly to be disturbing, or it may be likely that I was too damn tired and sleepy to care!
On the last weekend in May we decamped to the beach for one afternoon. I was lying there, very pleasantly, watching the sky overhead, when I saw a strange shape flying over at a great speed very high above us. At first I thought it was a giant moth, it was sort of black and fluttery. It was going too fast to be a hand-glider, and its movements were too all over the place to be a normal aircraft of any kind. It kept twisting and turning too awkwardly for that.
“What the hell is that?” I said out loud, without thinking.
This attracted the attention of some people nearby. One man reached for his binoculars, and we all tracked it for a while. It’s safe to say everyone was fairly puzzled.
“I think it may be an escaped balloon”, said the man with the binoculars “Just going by the way its moving”.
“Like those Chinese lanterns that spark off UFO sightings”, said Misty.
Possibly.