Forever Amber

This afternoon, we decided to jump in the car and take Rubin for a long walk in the countryside just outside town.  We actually thought we were being pretty clever here (Yeah, I know: famous last words…), because the thing is, our house is surrounded by woodland. And Rubin’s fur is like velcro. So, basically, every time we walk him during Autumn/Winter (so from September – May, really), he comes home looking a bit like an Ent, with entire trees tangled up in his fur, and, well, it’s not much fun for any of us, really.

“I know!” said Terry this afternoon. “We’ll take him on a different walk, far, far from the wicked trees! Then the worst we’ll have to worry about will be a bit of mud!”

Or, you know, a LOT of mud. Like, OMGTHATISALOTOFMUD.  And also quite a lot of trees, to be honest, because it’s not like there are NO TREES in the countryside, is it?

Trees. In the countryside. WHO KNEW?

Rubin really enjoyed his walk, though. Terry and I? Not so much, to be honest. Not once we got him home, anyway, and had to spend the best part of an hour bathing him, then cleaning the bath, cleaning the floors, scraping mud off the walls, ceiling, and all of the other places Rubin managed to shake it. And did Rubin care?

Well, what do YOU think?

Oh yeah, I also managed to capture a UFO, out there on that lonely road:

Or possibly a scary ghost, which has been following me around, ever since it ransacked my kitchen (who, me, exaggerate?) and switched on my TV the other night? At first I thought it was just the reflection of the sun or moon in a puddle, but this photo is actually a duplicate of the one above Rubin, and as you can see, there’s no water there. Definitely a ghost, then. That, or my iPhone case creating weird effects again. My money’s on “ghost”, though.

Amber

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This weekend, something went bump in the night. Literally, I mean.

It was Sunday night/Monday morning. We’d been in bed for maybe half an hour – long enough to have completed the ritual of Rubin padding up to the bedroom door and being sent back to his own bed approximately eleventy-one times, anyway – when suddenly there was a loud BANG from downstairs.

The noise had definitely come from inside the house: there was no possibility of it having been something out in the street, say, and it was loud enough to send Rubin into a frenzy of barking, and make Terry and I sit bolt upright and stare at each other, each of us wondering who had left the front door open THIS time, and whether or not we were YET AGAIN in danger of being murdered in our beds.

Well, once again, Terry drew the short straw (because yeah, right, like I’d venture downstairs in the middle of the night to investigate a mysterious noise. I may like to THINK I’m Nancy Drew, but actually, I’m more like Scooby Doo in these situations, if I’m completely honest…) threw on his dressing gown and headed downstairs, and ONCE AGAIN I lay in bed, shivering slightly and imagining all kinds of horrible endings to this particular story.

Terry, meanwhile, got to the bottom of the stairs, stepped into the living room, and, as if on cue…

THE TV SUDDENLY SWITCHED ITSELF ON. YES, JUST LIKE IN THE RING!

I swear I’m not making this up.

Of course, Terry didn’t actually TELL me this had happened until the next morning. “I thought it might freak you out,” he said casually, as if it was totally no biggie, and TVs are just ALWAYS switching themselves on in the middle of the night, following a mysterious banging sound. And he was right about that, too: if I’d known that the mysterious BANG had been immediately followed by a mysterious switching-on-of-the-TV, I would instantly have deduced that, why, we were obviously in the middle of a horror movie! And I would have proceeded straight the basement, just like a good horror movie heroine who gets killed. OK, I wouldn’t have: and not just because we don’t got no basement. It’s fair to say that I wouldn’t have gotten much sleep, though, and the reason I know that is because I didn’t get much sleep the NEXT night, on account of how I was lying awake the whole time, listening for mysterious banging noises.

Oh, and about that: Terry didn’t find anything at all to explain the bang during his nighttime tour of the house. He obviously wasn’t looking very closely, though, because when I went down to make coffee the next morning, I walked into the kitchen, and saw the two canvas prints which are currently propped up against one of the walls, both lying face down on the worktop, as if they had offended some ghostly hand and been thrown down there. (Which I bet they did, seriously.) This, I can only assume, had been what we’d heard the night before.

We have no explanation for this occurrence, or the switching on of the TV, other than that there is totally a ghostly presence in our house now, and it REALLY dislikes those prints. And possibly wanted to catch up on its soap operas, or something.

My money is on it being the ghost of our old friend NIGEL. And folks? He’s ANGRY.

(Image has nothing to do with post. Is cute, though, no?)

Amber

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Remember Nigel, the International Man of Mystery next door?

No, of course you don’t: it’s now been almost six years (SIX! YEARS!) since Nigel was last sighted, and almost two since I last wrote speculatively about the possibility of him being either a spy or a serial killer, so I doubt I have any readers left from Those Days. (“This was all fields! And we had to walk uphill in the snow, both ways! And we could go to bed and leave our door open… oh, we still do that, don’t we?”) It’s OK, though, because here is the series of deeply exciting and not-at-all-hysterical posts I wrote on the subject, you’re welcome:

An Introduction to Nigel, the International Man of Mystery Next Door
Nigel is Sighted
Nigel Update
Nigel, the International Man of Mystery in my Attic
 Nigel Alert!
 Here Come the Men in Black

It’s OK, I’ll wait here while you read them.

You’re done? You’re sure? I will ask questions, you know. OK, well, anyway…

Today, people, I bring you A NIGEL UPDATE. And, actually, I’ve just realised that it’s almost exactly the same as the LAST Nigel update I brought you, so now I feel kind of stupid. Here is a completely unrelated photo I took of the Magic Garden Centre yesterday to distract you from the fact that I’m about to tell you the same thing twice. I said, I’m about to tell you the same thing twice:

I thought it looked a bit like some weird, alien culture attacking earth, no?

What was I talking about? Oh yeah: Nigel, the International Man of Mystery Next Door.

So, anyway, this morning there was a knock on the door (which was closed AND locked at the time, go us!), and for once it wasn’t the police. (Yeah, still not over that, obviously…) In fact, it was a Mysterious Stranger in a suit, with a long black overcoat and a leather folio thing full of official looking papers. I mean, I’m assuming they were official looking papers, here: I witnessed this man from behind the closed blinds in the bedroom window, so I didn’t actually get a close look at the papers. They could’ve been photos of shoes, for all I know. That’s what I would carry around in a posh folio thing, anyway. Let’s pretend they were official papers, though. And that the man was from MI5. Trust me, it will make this post much more interesting.

(Let’s also pretend I was wearing this dress at the time:

Dress of My Dreams

It won’t make the story any more interesting, unfortunately, but it WILL give me an excuse to post a photo of that dress, and God knows, I’ve been looking for one.)

Terry answered the door.

“The eagle flies at midnight!” said the man. OK, he didn’t. But he did start asking Terry a whole lot of questions about Nigel. Where is he? When was he last seen? Where does he work? Who is he REALLY? That kind of thing. All of the questions we ask ourselves about Nigel, really.

“Look,” said Terry, “If I knew all of this, I’d be a happy man, because then my wife would stop bugging me about this.” Yeah, no, he didn’t. Terry did, however, ask the man who HE was, and what he needed to know all of this for, at which point the mysterious stranger deftly changed the subject, and, without actually answering Terry, started repeating his “Where is he, have you seen him?” questions. Probably to see if he could catch Terry out, I would imagine. They do that.

(WHO ARE THEY?)

After that, the man went outside and had a good look around the property, looking exactly like a spy. Like, EXACTLY. And afterwards, Terry came upstairs and said to me, “Did you get a photo of him?” And I said, “GOOD GOD, MAN, WHAT DO YOU TAKE ME FOR? It’s not like I’m going to Instagram the Mysterious Stranger at the door, am I? They’d probably cut off my hands for that, or something!”

(NO, SERIOUSLY, WHO ARE THEY?)

And then Terry looked at me, like, “Well, you Instagram everything else, so…”

Conclusion: er, there isn’t one, really. It’ll be six years this summer since we last saw him. The mystery continues…

Amber

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A few weeks ago, Terry decided that he hadn’t seen enough snow over the past couple of winters, so he and a couple of his friends booked a series of snowboarding lessons at a place in Glasgow. The lessons are mostly on a Sunday, and because my car is yet to be fixed after my little fender bender over Christmas, this means that I’m left home alone.

Now, I don’t know what you do when you have the house to yourself for several hours of a Sunday afternoon (I’m guessing probably NOT THIS, though…) but I experiment with ridiculous hairstyles:

Yeah. So, obviously I didn’t actually go out like this – it was a “strictly for fun, and also boredom” thing –  but I’d always wanted to try out a massive beehive, and by that I don’t mean the little baby beehives I sometimes do with a bumpit, or that velcro thing I got from eBay that one time, but a proper Amy Winehouse/Marge Simpson/Patsy from AbFab kind of ‘hive. (Mostly Patsy, to be honest. Because when I’m older, I intend to make Pats my role model, and just be drunk all the time…)

I will also wear sunglasses all the time, because… actually, because I do that anyway. People hate me for it. I don’t care.

I took the beehive down before Terry got home. I did show him the photos, though, and he kind of laughed in a strange way, and looked at me funny. Then I think I heard him calling his friends and saying he can’t leave me on my own no more, or he comes home to Snooki, apparently.

P.S. Those of you who asked me on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram: a ton of volumising powder, then a ton of backcombing. And seriously, that’s it.

Amber

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So, after yesterday’s incident, in which Terry left the front door open all night, prompting the police to pay us a visit in the early hours of the morning, I resorted to desperate measures to make sure the same thing couldn’t happen with the BACK DOOR:

What? A bit of an over-reaction, you think? Trust me, this particular event has been in the post for a loooong time now. A looong time. It was just… unfortunate… that it had to happen on the very day the doors in our house were already under a black cloud. And hey, isn’t it funny that we left the front door wide open, and then made sure it was totally impossible to get out of the back one? And by “funny”, I mean, “GAH, I’m going back to bed now. With wine.” Who knew doors would one day declare themselves The Enemy?

That’s how Terry came to spend all of Friday afternoon procuring, and then fitting, new locks and handles for both of our doors. It took a while. And it was FREEZING. Now our house is like Fort Knox, though: or, at least, it will be, assuming we actually remember to LOCK THE DAMN DOORS, FFS.

I don’t think he’ll be making THAT mistake again in a hurry, somehow.

We tried to rescue the day with a nice, relaxing evening, but right before we went to bed we let Rubin out, and he came back in like this:

I refer not to the OMGDEMONEYES, but to the mud on his face, paws and undercarriage. We don’t know what happened out there in the garden. We honestly don’t WANT to know. But it did mean that at 1am in the morning, we found ourselves facing a “Dog in the Bath” situation:

And that concluded our Friday the 13th. We’re not really looking forward to the next one…

Amber

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(Coat, H&M; skirt, Topshop; sweater, Primark (c/o my parents); boots, Sam Edelman; watch Michael Kors (both c/o Shopbop))

On Friday 13th, I was woken in the early hours of the morning by the sound of Rubin barking.

I opened one eye and looked around the room. Yup – pitch dark. It was either very, very late, or very, very early, and neither one of those times was one I wanted to be awake in, so I closed my eyes again and hoped Terry would get up to deal with whatever it was that was going down. And Terry obviously thought the same thing, so we both lay there for a few seconds in the dark, playing “Rubin Chicken”: the game  in which we both pretend to be asleep and wait to see who will break first and get up.

(I am THE CHAMPION of Rubin Chicken, by the way. UNDEFEATED.)

Rubin barked again.

“SHUT UP RUBIN!” Terry and I yelled, almost simultaneously. (Whoops: cover blown!)

But Rubin did not shut up. In fact, he took the hysterical barking up a notch, and as I lay there and listened to him, I realised that this was not his usual, tentative, “Oh, hai! I can come into your bed, plz?” bark. It wasn’t even his slightly sheepish, “Dudes, I need to gooooo…” bark. Nope, this was his “OMFG, SOMEONE IS BREAKING INTO THE HOUSE AND WE ARE ALL ABOUT TO BE MURDERED IN OUR BEDS, EXCEPT NOT ME, BECAUSE I’M UP, BARKING!” bark. Oh, crap.

Terry realised this at the same time I did, so he threw back the covers and dashed out of the room, and as he opened the bedroom door, a second realisation hit me: Rubin was not barking from his usual night-time location, which is, for reasons too complex and yet boring to go into here, the hall outside our room. No, Rubin was barking from DOWNSTAIRS somewhere.

Now, it’s not totally unknown for Rubin to be downstairs when he’s not supposed to be. A few years ago, Terry constructed a low barrier (We refer to it as “The Perimeter”, as in “Quick: set up a perimeter - they’re not going anywhere!”) to keep him confined to the hallway when we’re out, but Rubin has recently learned that he can push the perimeter over if he really wants to, so occasionally we will return from wherever we’ve been and he’ll meet us at the front door, all, “Hai! Come on in, take your coats off, let me show you around!” He doesn’t normally do this during the night, though, because, well, he’s asleep, so for him to be barking his “INTRUDER ALERT! INTRUDER ALERT!” bark, downstairs, in the wee small hours, made me wonder if there actually WAS an intruder, as opposed to, you know, someone sneezing in the next street, or a bird landing on the lawn, or one of the other non-events that tend to make Rubin lose his mind.

This suspicion seemed to be confirmed when, even after Terry had thundered downstairs to join him, Rubin’s barking continued at the same, hysterical pitch. What the hell was going on down there, I wondered? Why hadn’t Terry done something to shut Rubin up? Was he just standing there, watching him bark crazily, or… or had he run downstairs, been instantly killed by the INTRUDER, and now Rubin was barking at Terry’s prone body, while said INTRUDER crept slowly up the stairs towards me?

This seemed like the only possible explanation for Terry’s silence and Rubin’s continued barking, so I got shakily out of bed, and as I did so, I happened to find myself facing the bedroom window. The bedroom window which looks out onto our driveway. Our driveway which now had a POLICE CAR sitting at the bottom of it.

OH. MY. GOD.

You know how people say, “My legs turned to jelly?” Turns out that’s actually a THING. My legs almost gave way under me as I realised that this was IT: this was that moment I’ve been expecting all my life – the one where there’s a knock on the door on the middle of the night, and the police are standing there looking solemn, and saying, “You might want to sit down, ma’am, I’m afraid we have some bad news…” And in that instant, your whole life shatters, and nothing is ever the same again. It happens in the early hours of the morning of Friday the 13th, 2012, and even as you make your way along the hall, on legs that feel like they don’t belong to you anymore, somehow remembering to grab your dressing gown from the bedroom floor as you pass, because you figure you’ll want to be at least semi-clothed for whatever you’re about to be faced with, your mind is screaming REWIND, REWIND, and you’re thinking, “NONONO, I don’t want to do this. I was just lying there, sleeping. I was going to get up and go for a run, and do my work, and later maybe watch a movie and have a glass of wine. I don’t want to do THIS instead,” and you don’t even know what THIS is, but you know it’s going to be horrendously, unspeakably awful, because the police don’t knock on your door in the middle of the night for nothing, do they?

Halfway down the stairs, I paused. The living room was empty. Rubin was still barking at the door, and from the porch I could hear the low murmur of voices as Terry spoke to the police. I could just sit here, on the stairs, I thought. I could just sit here and wait, and delay the inevitable. And I thought, who is it?  What has happened, and to who? And then I didn’t think any more, I just got up and I walked into the living room, picking up Rubin, and hearing Terry give a small laugh in the porch, and…

WAIT, WHAT?

A laugh? He’s laughing at something? The world isn’t ending?

And then I sank down onto the rug, and I sat there and I waited.

A few seconds later, the door opened and Terry walked into the living room. “Oh, hi!” he said brightly, as if it was the most normal thing in the world for us to be meeting in the darkened living room at this time of the morning, him fresh from a brief doorstep interview with the police.

“WELL?” I hissed.  ”What THE HELL?”

“Oh, that,” said Terry nonchalantly. “Someone called them, apparently. It seems that our front door was wide open, so they had to come round and check everything was OK.”

And that, my friends, is why I began Friday the thirteenth, 2012, with one of the biggest frights of my life. Because Terry didn’t close the front door when he took the rubbish out last night, and our neighbour noticed and called the police, worried that we’d been murdered in our beds or something. And… let’s just say there wasn’t any sleep for either of us after that. I may actually never sleep again, because ever since that moment when I saw the police car parked at the end of the drive, my mind has kept circling back to What if? What if they really HAD been knocking on the door with some unthinkably awful news? And then I wouldn’t be sitting here, drinking coffee and looking at shoes on the internet, while I think about maybe taking a walk later with the dog.

I still feel like that moment is coming for me. But not today.

(And I’ll be checking the door myself from now on. Also: WINE. Bring it.)

P.S. I have to admit that, once I realised nothing awful had happened, I got a bit excited thinking it might be something to do with Nigel, the International Man of Mystery Next Door (Now into Year 5 of his unexplained absence). Alas, that particular mystery remains unsolved…