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I was up early with Ernie and Catie got a well-deserved lie-in. I was off on my secret TV mission this afternoon and am away for 7 of the next 10 days. I enjoyed being up with my ball of energy son and making him breakfast.
He complained he was still hungry and wanted crisps, but even I am not soft enough to give him proper junk food for breakfast (I can pretend that Rice Krispie shapes are the healthiest of health foods) so I said he could have an apple with Biscoff spread on it. I am the dad of the year.
I peeled his apple and cut it up, leaving the core and in my attempt to eat 50+ different kinds of plants every week I decided to eat the remaining apple flesh that I hadn't cut off. It was a proper apple nibble and I can't have got off anything bigger than a few milimetres, so I was surprised to find that a bit of apple was caught in my throat.
It was an unpleasant experience and it felt like something huge was lodged in my neck, but I was still able to breath. I coughed to try and move it, I wretched, I drank water, I almost threw up, but still it felt like a bit of pomme was resting in my food pipe. How do you like those sky potatoes? I don't like them at all.
I kept trying to dislodge the interloper, gargling, almost drowning, almost being sick. The noise and commotion woke Catie and Phoebe who came down to see if I was dying. The children were afraid. I was pretty sure I was OK, but it didn't feel nice and I didn't understand why I couldn't swallow this tiny bit of food and worried that it might move over my wind pipe. Though surely if it moved then I would be freed from this mild hell.
Perhaps something had just scratched my throat on the way down, because nothing was changing. This was my life now. I was living with an extra Adam's Apple, though technically it was Ernie's Apple. If only I hadn't tried to be healthy for him and myself I would have avoided this situation.
I took the dog for a walk, listening to the Terry Jones autobiography audiobook, feeling sad about his decline and death, worrying the apple might slide over and suffocate me. I got to Hitchin cemetery to commune with the Hitchin dead and thought how apt it would be if I was to die here, after all the speculation about the lives and deaths of others. There weren't many people around. Would I be found in time? Would Wolfie do a Lassie and save me?
Luckily I survived to live another day and walked home, passing the house we'd looked at a couple of years ago, which was being sold by a divorcing couple. The husband was living in the attic alone, surrounded by framed photos of the family together which had been taken down but not put away. They were in his bedroom.
We didn't like the house anyway, but sadness hung in the place like a bad smell. Also there was quite a bad smell as it turned out that in the upstairs bathroom there was a sizeable piece of shit on the toilet seat. Not just a smear from an unwiped bottom. A proper dollop of (hopefully) human faeces, that had somehow been left (presumably) by the sad man who lived in the house, surrounded by memories.
I'd have been tempted to clean it off if I knew there was a viewing and it was hard to work out how he could have done this by accident, without noticing it.
Even had we loved the house I couldn't have lived here after seeing this. Even if we gutted the bathroom and put in a new toilet. The ghost of that man's misery and more importantly the ghost of his shit (possibly even the actual shit itself) would have haunted us. I think of that crap every time I walk past the house. There's new people in there now, I think. I bet they have a sense of unease and are unable to put their finger on what's wrong.
Unless they've changed the toilet, they are probably putting their bottom on what's wrong.
Work at your marriages people. The alternative is too terrible to contemplate.
I didn't noticeably swallow the apple, but the feeling of apple throat went away. I lived through the day. Take that Hitchin dead. I win again.
