1. I Always Wanted Something to Write About!

30/10/08

I'm writing this, now, because I've finally found myself with something to say and we haven't got much else to do for the next 10 days. I might as well make the most of the time and people like to read diaries, especially when something out of the ordinary is happening - which it is. 10 days might be a bit short for a book, but maybe a newspaper serialisation... Rosey, don't start hoping it'll take longer than 10 days just for the sake of a book! There's a lot of bad things to being stuck in the house not really knowing what's going on. 10 days is going to be hard enough.

Having lost my audience by talking to myself, I'll get down to the facts. Yesterday, about 5:00pm, we hear a loudspeaker thing coming down the road. One of those they have on a van when they're going to switch the water off, which is what we thought it would be. Only, it wasn't. Oh no, "Your water will be off for the next 4 hours, we recommend you fill some bottles, sorry for the inconvenience" would have been most welcome.

Instead, it was something along the lines of:

"Residents of Farnsworth. Please remain in your homes. Please close all windows, curtains and doors. For your safety, please remain in your homes and do not attempt to leave them until you receive further notification."

You hear something like that and you just freak out. Because they never tell you what you need to know.

• WHY?
• Are we going to die?
• Is this happening everywhere?
• What do I do about work?
• What if I need something from the Spa?

I know the answers now, well most of them, not the top one, entirely.
The rest of the answers, not upside down at the end of the book, but here, are:

• ...
  
• No
• No
  
• Nothing
• Tough

I didn't know that then and so I went straight into over-dramatic panic mode which was disappointing because I've always visualised myself as calm, philosophical. I blame the fact that we didn't get any other information, so the imagination is left to run wild, worser case scenarios building on worse case scenarios. Also B. was so matter of fact about it it seemed only right for me to add a bit of hysteria to proceedings. But you can only panic so much when presented with a cup of tea and a biscuit and I was beginning to annoy myself, so we decided that the most likely reason was a dangerous animal or person at large in village - hence staying in. Perhaps not a person as they said close, not secure? Or was that an oversight on their part? We locked everything anyway. Closing the curtains we figured was because we might see something nasty. I think we mainly decided that because we don't have curtains at the back of the house so we had to make do with just not looking out of them!

Now I've lost my flow. More tomorrow, or maybe later.