Something Nasty in the Field

Dahlings did not expect to blog again so soon but had to share this as part of my personal trauma therapy.

I have a phobia about snakes.

I just saw a snake in Real Life while walking Monty Dog.

Serves me right for my post about the deadly yellow tree snak http://blightyworld.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/hi-boy-won-here-i-am-doing-writing.html

So I am plodding along and suddenly notice right next to me by the hedge a grey snake coiled up in a figure of eight asleep in the sun. It's all a bit dreamlike. I don't scream or react, my mammalian brain thinks oh snake and I keep walking and keep walking and hope to goodness the dog does not decide to play with his new friend but luckily he does not even notice and I keep walking and walking and then start saying yuck, yuck, yuck.

When I have put a couple of fields between me and the Thing I phone Mr Blighty who is at a football tournament with Boy 2 and tell him and he says it's just a grass snake and I say, no it was grey and huge, it must be an anaconda, and Mr B gets all technical and nitpicky and points out anacondas are not native to Buckinghamshire and I say, well, there are lots of cheap flights these days...

And I carry on walking and feel better and then I see a red kite drifting on the warm air currents and I remember what the window cleaner who talks more than cleans told me: they like carrion, so if they swoop down and pick something up and it's alive, they drop it and once they dropped a snake on his patio...so now I feel much worse, am convinced the red kite is going to drop the snake on my head, so I walk along hunched over with one hand round the back of my neck to stop it going down my back and one hand on my head and taking tiny steps, so I look like a hundred year old woman...

And I am grateful the annoying teen Boy 1 is not with me because if he had picked it up or poked at it, he may be my dearly loved first born but I would definitely knock his teeth out...

And no, I did not stop to take a photo!!


So, it's important not to over react.  Here's the plan:

We sell the house and buy a tiny flat in Marble Arch London which should be suitably urban so as to avoid any snakes in the wild (note to self: check situation re London Zoo escapees)

Boys 1 and 2 to attend inner London comprehensive

Monty Dog needs the country life so he will go to Eton

I know all the lovely Aussie ladies will think I am a total wuss, which I am.  I can still remember their serpenty anecdotes on Faux Fuchsia's blog along the lines of   " so I was in the car with my baby and opened the door and a black mamba slivered in so I chopped its head off with an axe" and, my personal favourite, " I saw a massive rattler next to the gas cylinders outside and I was about to shoot it when my dad said geez, you shoot that cylinder, the whole house will go up.."

But here in our cosy little pocket of rural England this is what passes for peril.

Right, if you need me, I be indoors, in my wellies with my anorak hood up, looking at London flats and the Eton entrance requirements.