Pretty Average – But Apparently Good At One Thing!

As most of you know I’m not the kind of person to blow my own trumpet. Never have been. Never will be. And why should I? What’s so great about me? Nothing. I’m pretty average at most things, slightly better at some than others, and before you go thinking that I’m expecting you to rush in with, ‘Of course you are special’ and ‘look at all the things you’ve achieved in your long time on the planet,’ that is NOT where this is leading. This is leading to actually being surprised at learning, straight from the horse’s mouth, Richard, that I AM really good at something.

So, this is how it went – I was in the garden busily minding my own business and watching the garden coming to life before my eyes when, he stomped up the garden and shattered the moment.

‘Can you come and look at this?’ he shouted over the bud-bursting gooseberry bushes.

‘Look at what?’ I said, a tad irritably. You see, he always has something that has to be done NOW and it will never wait, though in reality most ‘urgent’ things could have waited.

‘Just come and look will you?’

‘What AT?’ I said, even more irritably. ‘Can’t you just cut the suspense and TELL me?’

He dithered on the spot a bit before saying, ‘No. I need you down at the garage.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’ve got something living in there and I don’t know what it is?’

I rolled my eyes a bit and held up my palms to Him above. ‘What do you mean you’ve got something living in there? Give me a clue. If you don’t know what it is how am I supposed to know?’

‘Because you’re really good at this kind of thing,’ he said.

‘What kind of thing?’

‘Shit.’

‘Shit?’

‘Yes,’ he said, as I now caught up with him and started to head towards the house and the garage. ‘I need you to look and tell me what kind of shit it is.’

Eh?

‘What it’s come out of,’ he elaborated.

‘Who am I?’ I stage whispered as we passed the neighbour on the other side of the fence, ‘a crap expert?’ (Or should that be an expert on crap? Yes, I think so)

‘Shush,’ he stage whispered back.

As we reached the garage he pointed to a shelf. ‘Look!’

I looked.

‘What shit is that?’

Well, it didn’t take Poirot to decipher this little mystery, the entire shelf was littered with large rice-shaped droppings and chewed-up insulation foam where the ‘mystery’ creature had obviously entered. ‘A rat,’ I said. ‘Rat poo.’

‘Are you sure?’

You see – he asks my opinion and then questions it. Was my answer a disappointment? Had he wanted it to belong to some creature previously assumed extinct? ‘It’s rat poo,’ I repeated.

‘I mean – it isn’t mouse droppings, then?’

‘Well, it would be a bloody big mouse – or a normal size mouse with a bloody big bum, in that case, don’t you think?’

With that I toddled back up the garden and continued watching the gooseberry buds open.

After I’d finished mumbling to myself I realised that Richard was probably asking the right person. After all, I’ve been dealing with one kind of shit after another, all my life.

Even Chea delights in scratching huge holes in my greenhouse borders and sits doing her business, right under my nose, like it’s the most natural thing in the world and she expects me to applaud at the final squeeze.

I even have bags of the stuff, farmyard manure and horse manure, stacked-up by the side of the greenhouse ready to use if I should deem it necessary. And this doesn’t even take into consideration the crap of life!

So, maybe Richard was right and I am actually good at something? But keep it quiet. I’m not sure I want that little fact as my epitaph!

Take care all xx