School-run time-if only that was all.

Deb is home today, so I figure life should be a little easier. Hah!

While the kids get ready for school she takes the pups for a walk and I pull together a set of prompts for Boot Camp. I used the letters of T S Eliot, a few poems from "Staying Alive" and half a dozen of my own lines, all mixed in.

I'm just posting when I hear Deb shouting. Anything not absolutely neutral/cruising is a crisis for Deb but she's REALLY shouting, she's lost the dogs in a field.

The kids (big surprise) respond, and I do (if you ignore the fact I'm shoeless etc) but by the time I get out I have to think WHICH field, which way (which town, which country.)

I shout, no response, so decide to jog on our usual morning route. I spot the kids one side of a hedge, the dogs the other, Deb a further 100 yards off ranting.

Point is KIDS if you call them THIS WAY and yer mother calls them THAT way…

Duh.

To get to the gate is another few hundred yards. Deb is in the middle of the field and the dogs are "over by the kids".

In fact they are OVER BY THE TRAPPED DEER, a Bambi sized, totally terrified little thing which the dogs want to eat/play with, chat about.

I have to attack the dogs (COS I AM ALPHA DOG, KNOW THIS) and frighten them away, chase them, then I turn to this deer.

It's whimpering, sounds quite human and it is very fucking stupid pushing itself further into the trapping wire fence. I can see its face is very bloody. I don't know if that's the fence or the dogs, but I do know this crazed, powerful "little" animal is going to go into shock and die unless I do something.

I try to release it by going to the head end and making it want to scrabble backwards (forwards is just making the trap more permanent.) But the mutt just screams and digs a deeper hole.

Now I have to run back to the house (about half-a-mile) find some tools with which I MIGHT be able to cut the deer free. I send Deb off on the school run (we were going to the gym straight after) get a toolbag from the garage and run back.

I should say I'm in singlet and shorts, under a waterproof jacket. It looks like I'm ONLY wearing the jacket. My trainers are soaking wet. Normally I'd wear wellies in that particular field.

On the way back, a guy from the gravel pit shouts. He's in work-clothes, a safety-top, white crash-hat etc and he's got long dirty-blond hair. Over the noise of the pit he hand-signals that he thinks the deer is out. I see one (it looks BIG) belting across the field. But is it the mother? I have to go get wet again and check the baby.

When I get there, sure enough, the little feller has managed to get free. I think it will live but it'll have a few handsome scars.

I try out this best-use tool on the fence (for future reference). Yes it will cut through the wire.

It's now half-eight.

I go in, record this before it's forgotten (important tip, things mutate.)

Now, do I still go to the gym? (A mile walk cos Deb has the car) or should I get writing?

I think I need to work out, shower, get zipped up, ready to fire.

I don't know what it is about me and "incidents". I could fill a book of them from crashing aircraft, the Clapham Rail Disaster, dying deer, dying swans, con-men, a terrorist incident. Fuck fiction, maybe I should just keep a diary.

OK this "incident" is a little one, but I must embrace it and not the direct immediate specifics, but my reactions, like the van I stopped (did he have wire cutters?) like the man on the rig in the gravel pit (made me think of YMCA, The Village People) or the way the drama is halted for the wife and kids but continues for me, and then I'm in a kind of limb, plans temporarily awry.

As I walked back, a fleet of Canada geese came in low. The noise they make sounds man-made, heavy, machine-like. The dogs cannot figure it out when geese fly over.

A neighbour is leaving, she see me, bare legs sticking from a jacket and I'm carrying a brown tool-bag like Jack the Ripper. I think her ten year old daughter averts her eyes.

In the house the dogs are in their cage, snuggled up, puppies, cute. Killers.


Alx