It is Wednesday, so it is unlikely to be the local 'freesheet', wrapped tenderly around a number of leaflets offering various configurations of our regional speciality, chips adorned with cheese curd and gravy; equally, because it is Wednesday, it is a day too late for the The Veterinary Pathologist , and a day too soon for Hot Cockwagons Weekly, my own publication of choice.
I open the mailbox and cannot see anything, despite trying to insert my entire head into its inviting interior. But what is that at the back? Good heavens! It is a tiny, tiny parcel, no bigger than my hand, weighing no more than a brace of sizeable Macadamia nuts.
I take it out and look at it. Our address is scrawled (accurately!) across the front of the envelope. Has it been written by an idiot? Probably not; they have managed to write the address in the proper style; four stamps have been affixed in a straight line; the parcel is clearly marked PRIORITY. I notice that the stamps are Dutch and that it has been sent from Amsterdam.
But this does not give me any further clues; a cursory fondle of the package tells me that it is definitely not drugs (I know this because Canada Post held up a parcel with Hula-Hoops in it for three months, so I think they will have 'sniffed out' any funny seeds!!!), but it is also definitely not cheese, clogs, bulbs, a windmill or an almond-based confection, which are the other things you might get sent from the Netherlands.
I run across the road, slipping on three inches of impacted ice; I jog up the drive, glad that I live with a chap who likes to shovel and blow. I clamber up the ice-mount that has appeared in the drive in front of the steps that lead to the front door. The steps are scaled. I am nearly there.
But what is this? I cannot open the door! That is because it is -15 and I have been outside for more than thirty seconds. My fingers are white and I cannot feel anything. They are sticking a bit to the door latch thing. I tell the front door latch it is a cunt, a strategy that has worked before; the door springs open.
I am inside. Feeling returns to my fingers; my hair begins to defrost. Finally, I open the parcel. Inside there is a mysterious note! This is not the the first time I have received a mysterious note, but this time it is different!
Dear NWM,
I'm bored of business lunches with Mark and James and to be honest they rabble on like old women. They do however like their cakes which is a plus and I hear you like yours. In fact, I'm prepared to follow the muffin mix across the Atlantic for a little 'break' at yours.
I invite myself, in fact, and take the liberty of making my return open. I too would like to experience being a non-working monkey.
xxx"
And it is different for one reason and one reason alone: the mysterious note is wrapped around a thing no bigger than a thimble. Here it is, photographed on the front lawn earlier today:
I still do not know what to say about it all, and so I am going to think about it for a bit, pausing only occasionally to scratch my monkey head under my fez and draw quietly on my small clay pipe.
Whilst I consider the miraculous appearance of a monkey in my mailbox, I offer you, my readers, a kind of 'web-blog testcard' in the form of some photographs taken this afternoon with my instamatic camera. They are photographs of the apple trees in the field down the road where the local 'farming folk' are making ice cider.
These photographs will be extra-dull if you are used to snow but perhaps less so if you are from tropical England. With my English eyes, for example, the fields look like Narnia (but with tractors).
Pip pip!
8 comments:
I hope the monkey will be very happy in arctic Canada with you. It is so cold there and he doesn't have any clothes on other than his fez. Maybe you can knit him woolies.
I see you tracked through the snow in the orchard. I am sure this will be a more pleasant experience when the fruit ripens and ever so much more beautiful in the springtime with the blossoms.
For a minute there I thought you were going to tell us that you had locked yourself out of the house.
The monkey is OK for he has thick fur. And those footprints were not mine!! They were those (what looks like) a one-legged baboon. It is very mysterious. In fact, mystery is all around us.
Happily I did not lock myself out of the house; if I had have done, I would not be able to type for having lost my fingers. Fact.
I've just clocked it .. ICE CIDER ... can it be distantly related to Eiswein? I am thrilled. Can't wait.
That's not a one-legged baboon! It's a sasquatch. I know because I just watched an old television show with a sasquatch in so I'm well educated. Unfortunately that one turned out to be a very cranky tall man in a rather unconvincing hairy suit. He was stealing oil, the naughty boy, so you might want to drop a wise word to the ice cider people about the kleptomaniacal tendencies of the common or garden yeti.
Sasquatch doesn't hang out in orchards, he is much too shy for that and avoids human environments at all cost.
Most likely it was a one pegged pirate who had lost his bearings and who had ended up on dry land due to the freezing up of large parts of the Atlantic and floated to shore on an ice floe.
These kinds of pirates are very dangerous as they have very wobbly legs on land and have a tendency to topple over when you least expect it and they subsequently poke you in the eye with their peg leg when you try to help them up.
You can give them a bottle of rum and point them eastwards. There is much of Canada's quaint bits of knowledge only open to people who have been born there and is not available to immigrants and ex-pats.
red flag on postbox....I did not know that! hmm...In the U.S. part of North American the red flag up tells the post person there is something to pick up! those Canadians....
JPM - yes. If only they were able to drop off AND pick up here. But no. "They are very highly specialised, our post people", says the person with whom I share a house.
you do know that you're just encouraging more monkeys to stick themselves in the post, don't you... and one of these days a baboon will arrive. and you'll have to look after it.
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