4572/17501
I have been egged. I said egg.
We have a tiny bit of space at the back of our house, which is decked with grooved wood. There’s enough room to have a barbecue for a dozen people if they really like each other and it’s a nifty little sun trap between late morning and late afternoon. But it’s enclosed and as the gardens of the next street back on to it there is no way to access it except by jumping over the fences of the gardens that connect to it.
I went outside this evening to return a football that had, I presume, been kicked over by the kids next door when I saw two eggs on our sun lounger. One of them had smashed and was spreading its embryonic contents over the garden chaise lounge, the other had failed to break on impact and sat sadly, an unexploded bomb that had failed to achieve its mission. On further inspection I found two other eggs that had been more successful improvised albumen devices and had splattered into the decking and then been baked into the grooves by the sun. That was more annoying and my cursory attempts to remove the scrambled eggs was not entirely successful. Was that another egg down the side of the lounger and partly submerged in a waterlogged planting tray? Perhaps. Someone had lobbed four or five eggs into our garden. But who? And why? It was slightly unsettling.
My initial suspects were the children who live next door. All common sense and common prejudice would suggest that. Perhaps that they were annoyed that it had taken us a few hours to return their ball (again I assumed the ball was theirs, but was that a prejudicial assumption?) or perhaps they were just bored and feeling naughty and had found a carton of eggs. Certainly the eggs had largely fallen hear to the interconnecting fence. Their weak child arms might have tossed the eggs upwards and just cleared the fence. The unsmashed egg had landed on the soft lounger, but it hadn’t bounced far, suggesting it had come from nearby. In a sense this would be the least worrying possibility. The children were almost certainly doing this for shits and giggles and held no personal grudge against us (apart from maybe not being superfast with our complimentary ball return service). But was it too convenient to blame the children? And what if it wasn’t them and whoever threw the eggs did it because they hated us or were trying to send us a message.
The close grouping of five eggs suggests that the assailant must have been a relatively close neighbour. To throw five eggs across two or three gardens and for them all to land within three feet of each other would take the kind of egg throwing skills that you wouldn’t waste on a personal vendetta. Also this is London, so I have absolutely no interaction with people who live that far away. The only clue that might point to a more distant perpetrator is that only four or five eggs made it into our garden. What happened to the rest of the carton? Perhaps some more distant egg chucker had been throwing dozens of eggs in all directions, but again the relative proximity of the ones that hit us would suggest it wasn’t a scatter-gun technique. Perhaps a chicken had nested in the tree above our garden and laid its eggs from above. Actually they were all under the tree. But I doubt a chicken could have got up there without assistance so that still points to a deliberate attack.
So the neighbours to the left are young professionals, renting out the house. Might they have had party and things got out of hand or had some grudge over us not collecting our parcels delivered when we were out fast enough? Possibly they just had a food fight in their garden and a few eggs landed in our garden as collateral damage. But I don’t think they are serious suspects.
What about the houses behind us? I sometimes walk around in our kitchen with no clothes on. I am largely hidden from view, but a determined peeping tom who wished to see the ever-withering penis of a fat 47-year-old man might get the odd glimpse. But you’d have to properly be looking for it, so if my nudity offended you (and if you think my naked body is disgusting then you are criticising God who designed and created this sex-machine) then you could just turn away or not draw your own curtains. Perhaps a disgruntled Post Office worker lives in one of those flats and is fed up with me drawing attention to the sluggish service at his place of work -though traditionally Post Office workers favour bullets, not cloaca-bombs.
The comedian Stuart Goldsmith recently moved into one of those houses. Year upon year (apart from this year when someone else won) my comedy interview podcast out performs his in downloads and awards from obscure comedy websites. Has he finally cracked (geddit?) and decided to take egg-based vengeance upon me. It would be fair enough. I prefer his podcasts to mine (he’s the only person I pretty regularly listen to). It’s an odd coincidence that he moved in so close to me. Almost like this whole thing was his plan all along. Like a hen-gamete based Day of the Jackal.
Or what if the real ovoid-hooligan was closer to home. Might my wife, annoyed by me failing to appreciate just how magnificent she is, take her revenge by throwing eggs in our own garden. It would be a dangerous tactic. If I hadn’t noticed them then she would have had to live alongside the stink (though thanks to living with me she is probably almost immune to eggy stenches by now) and there was the chance that she might have to clean up the disgusting mixture of softly sun-cooked egg-juice and fractured chalky shell. But at least it was a crime that I would never suspect her of - bad luck, you got that wrong.
Might I have done it myself for similar reasons? Me2 certainly holds enough anger inside him do something like this.
Or perhaps all this was done by whoever it was who smashed those cupboards in Edinburgh. Rumour has it that he was obsessed with eggs.
