And tomorrow I'm off to spend a couple of days in a caravan with one of this country's most up-and-coming young veterinary students/castrators. She is staying in a village called Sixpenny Handley and I have a very long anecdote prepared about a swan to while away the evenings.
This was Sunday. It was blocking our path out of an uncharacteristically disreputable corner of the otherwise Ayckbourne-Arcadian (with a dash of frontiersman) island of Cleve Aits, just by the weir. On a tour of the island we had clambered through to an unlit shack with its untended garden of rusty motor fragments and purposelessly sawn-off plank corners - hundreds of them - and this inscrutable swan with its bulldog underside standing chest-high in our way as though it owned the place... which I found a very entertaining idea... and one that would account for the evidence of bad carpentry.
Tom of our number - clearly more up to speed than anyone else on which part of the swan it was exactly that could break which part of a person again (the neck, the arm? the wing, the neck?) - finally faced the creature off if that's a verb, and it waddled on to let us pass unhissingly... and I presume get back to work on the extension, clumsily sawing off more bits of uselessly short wood with its unevolved clipped wings...
Actually that's not much of an anecdote, is it.
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