It took quite a while to perfect walking across the ceiling but I got it in the end. Just takes practice. As the boot prints attest, this has become a favourite way of taking exercise. And life takes on a fresh perspective.
Jan next door likes to fly. I often hear her talking to seagulls and launching herself off the window ledge. She sometimes drops a fish or part of someone’s pie and chip dinner on my doorstep. Always grateful for a food delivery, and I’m not going to complain about seagull poo on the window.
Josh on my other side watched a film about Colditz and got interested in tunnelling. As an experiment he dug through to my kitchen but we’ve got a more ambitious plan. Josh was in the Boy Scouts and is very resourceful. His plan is to dig under the border between streets. The target is to make a tunnel into the care home just on the other side, so that residents can liberate themselves if they choose to.
A bold plan, and we had to pool our resources on this one. We have a contact on the inside whom Jan visits on her fly pasts. The big challenge, apparently, is to bring the tunnel up in an area of the home that is out of the way and can be covered over with a mat.
We zoom, we three octogenarian pals. When I say zoom, I’m not talking about that remote- control chat device. We have to zoom at night so nobody sees us, because you can get fined for being outside, and probably extra for zooming. We balance along the white line in the middle of the empty road chatting and pretending to be drones or motorbikes or moon buggies.
There’s nothing quite like the quiet and empty space available these days. Apart from the occasional outbursts of loud clapping, you hardly see or hear anything, just ambulances and people doing important stuff like bin emptying. Street lights and the ever-changing, electronic information boards are a bit of a hazard. The boards look like the Stock Exchange with constant updating of rules and regs. for staying locked down.
We make it to the border and I use the bolt cutters on the razor wire where needed. We hit the ground and wriggle along, using elbows for leverage, until our part-dug tunnel appears. Several shovels of dirt in each of our rucksacks, cover the tunnel and make for the park. That’s the most we can achieve in one visit. More tomorrow. We’ll get there.
No zooming now, rucksacks need to be emptied in the park and the lockdown-snitch vigilantes avoided. A flashlight catches us in its beam. Jan manages to fly off, Josh and I explain that we couldn’t sleep so decided to take a short walk but we’re going home now. We are escorted home, heads hung in fake contrition, accompanied by a lengthy admonishment. Young tosser. Good thing we’re old and frail and unthreatening.
