Dear Admirable of the Fleet Birdseye and Ms Scarlett
Given the nature of my coping mechanisms i.e. to turn everything into a joke when I'm sufficiently traumaxed (or as my father would tell it, A COMPLETE AND UTTER INCAPABILITY OF TAKING ANYTHING SERIOUSLY!!!! - you try it when you've a gun pointed at your temple, Indiana), may as well go out with a bang! Anyways, 'IS that a gun in your pocket or have you remained sober long enough to be PLEASED to see me?' did not go down too well and in an effort to drive his message home - it must have been coded because the Enigma team are still working on it - he dragged me through a glass door out onto the street, but not before he had sufficiently kicked through a starting point of shards. Well, of course, alerted to firearms in the marital home the local gendarmerie descended in a scene straight out of Miami Vice, dodging round corners guns at the ready, first one there and then two either side of what used to be the front door, posed and ready and in they went......and out came OT (the Other Thing as thereinafter referred to)........... like a pussy cat!!!
We were living in the Netherlands at this time, but before the Dutch are maligned, HE was English... but only in the swamp sense.
I think the starting point had been several nights previous when we had attended a fantastic music festival in the city centre, and as usual he had imbibed a toot or 19, leaving our daughter (9 at the time) and I to walk home, quite some miles, at two in the morning, singing in the rain. There wasn't a taxi to be found, naturally. He had no house key on him so you will understand my intrigue when I found him already IN the house, but battered and bruised - I needed to know how he accomplished this feat, not from any level of spousal concern, you understand; I just needed the name of the assumed assailant because I had money for him, lots.
Nobody in the village watched telly anymore, they just tuned into events down the road!
It transpired that he had entered through an open second floor window which looked onto a flat roof. However, in order to mount said roof he required some leverage. For
this particular maneouvre he disappeared into the dark, according to our mesmerised viewers, and after some time reappeared with a supermarket trolley into which he doggedly tried to sit and raise himself to his feet.......we lived on a hill, slight incline but nevertheless sufficient to impel him forth in the manner of a circus acrobat atop a galloping stallion, his only shortcoming on this occasion being his balance - akin to that of a weeble.
Suffice to say as I left aboard the good ship, I stood for'ard as figurehead and vowed in the manner of a heroine that never again would I be afraid.....and then Mum went into a BUPA nursing home.....................!
May the wind be always in your sails
Chesca della Porch