Sound of Silence

It’s been a while and, while I realise this isn’t quite the same as when I missed my last essay on King Lear, I feel I ought to explain. My excuse has all the brilliant melodrama and exaggeration that I sadly failed to summon in the face of Dr Sullivan’s wrath over my lack of comment on the use of the rhyming couplet in sibling rivalry disputes. You can believe me or not, personally I still don’t believe it.

Long story short, one morning a few months ago a man who used to be a family friend turned up at our house with a gun, some ‘devices’ and a scutch hammer and forced his way in. I learnt a few things that morning:

• Jumping from a high window is really, and I do mean really, easy if there’s a bloke with a gun on the other side of your bedroom door and it’s just your double bed holding him back.
• Time really does stand still: for two days after, everyone else in the world moved at half speed and colours were extraordinarily bright and clear. Briefly, like Sherlock Holmes, I wanted to shout ‘How can you be so s-l-o-w?’ at everyone and then annoyingly my moment of genius was gone and I was returned to my normal state of well, normality.
• The police keep change in a tupperware box for nipping round the corner to buy chocolate digestives for the rescued.
• Ten snipers in your back garden won’t be good for your herbaceous borders, not if they’re there all day for a siege.
• It upsets the neighbours, especially the one who shares a Christian name with the attacker, when the police marksmen get shouty and demanding.
• Lastly, if you do break in and then say you have lots of bombs, they make you take off all your clothes when you surrender and then they laugh about it down at the station with the victims.

It’s easy to be flip on here: the blog is flip and I like it that way. However, I’ve lost a few months of my life to this and it stopped me writing among other things. Last month it all went to trial and he was found guilty on several counts. We await sentencing. It’s not been much fun, but I’m getting there and I have written something down. Which is more than I can say for that last essay still due from 1982.