I put my phone in my top pocket and took Billie for a walk along the track and when I got back I had no phone in my top pocket or any pocket. So I re -did the walk - twice - met someone on the track who reminded me it was not the end of the world and who also looked where I had been. No phone.
My daughter had luckily put a tracker on the phone and assured me it said it was somewhere in the house. For two days I searched. Lifting up the sofas, looking in the fridge and the oven in case I'd had a real senior moment but to no avail. I mean even when I was younger and the cottage was freezing I made a hot water bottle and then couldn't find the stopper anywhere only eventually to see I'd left the carton of milk out but put the stopper in the fridge. Friends came round and rang the phone but there was no phone tinkling under a pile of papers or behind a cushion. (not that we have any cushions left thank you Billie).Eventually the lovely said daughter sent me a link to a
find my phone which if I pressed a button would emanate a loud bleeping noise from the phone even if it was on silent. Again I wandered round the house and the front garden and eventually went into the back garden where Billie doesn't normally go to hear it bleeping from the bottom of a large bag filled with hedge clippings. So Billie must have either picked it from the floor as I missed putting it in my pocket or she took it from my pocket and ran out and dumped it in the sack. I wouldn't have found it in months. I soon realised that what the man on the track said was true - it wasn't the end of the world especially after what is indeed happening in the world right now.
This lovely fox was in my daughter's garden in Peckham. You so rarely see them in the countryside but London and other cities have many urban foxes. A friend who has a boat told me that her husband had left a port hole open when he left and a fox had run along the gang plank in the marina and popped in through the porthole inviting some of his family to join him. He made a nice nest on their bed and chewed a few yachting shoes and maps. Pocket overheard me telling someone this and said that actually he was really a ship's cat and now wanted to sleep in a hammock if I could rig one up for him.
He adopted a sort of nautical swagger and paraded around the landing as if he was on deck of some eighteenth century warship like
The Wager about to invade the Spanish bounty hunters.
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, so do our minutes hasten to their end.' he said. That's Shakespeare I said - I didn't know you'd read the sonnets. He stared at me from behind the eye patch I noticed he'd slipped on. I shouted after him that actually
The Wager had sunk and what was left of the crew were castaway on a barren island where there were absolutely no mice and would he like that? He ignored me and swayed off muttering that the ship's biscuits had weevils in them. Rocket trotted past me with a lime in his mouth and when I asked him what on earth he was doing with a lime he informed me that Pocket told him he might get scurvy unless he ate some citrus.
Here is Rocket on a real boat travelling over to the Isle of Wight for a day outing and was worried that he didn't have a life jacket on.
I found this poem that I wrote a while ago and forgotten all about as I was trawling through some notebooks and as it's about a fox I thought I'd include it here.
A psalm for the lady fox
A psalm for the lady fox
as red as their coats
as red as a rose
and the setting sun
who runs with her mate
before the hounds
over hill and dale
till the sun goes down.
A psalm for the lady fox
as the hunt gives chase
past the farm with the geese
over fence and gate
away from her cubs
she keeps safe underground
she leads them away
till the sun goes down.
A psalm for the lady fox
who stealing a hen
is shot by the farmer
outside of the pen
A psalm for the lady fox
whose blood on the path
flows red as their coats
as she lies in the grass
and whose milk from her teats
which also flows
is as white as the moon
and the drift of the snow
a psalm for the lady fox
killed by the gun
whose fur was as red as the setting sun.
Linda Coggin
