The past week has been less than positive in many ways and, judging from the screenshot below, I’m not the only person to feel that way.
Whether the local election results (stories 1 and 2) have anything to do with the BBC readers’ apparent morbid obsession, I don’t know.
Perhaps they’ve been unable to get through to the new NHS 111 service (story 10) and while waiting for their urgent but non-life-threatening health problems to be attended to they have felt the need to console themselves with reading how things could be worse.
The screenshot is from a couple of days ago (“thanks!” to the reader who sent it to me) and it suited this week’s aura of negativity.
I was beginning to feel things were never going to improve.
As I was preparing lunch today, though, I saw several cars pull up at the gate, look and point at the house, and then drive away. Each car had three or four people in, some of whom clearly had clipboards and were making notes.
Eventually, curiosity got the better of me and I went out to find out what was going on.
It turns out that there’s a local treasure hunt and, as it’s the one nearest to a particular lamp-post, this house is the answer to one of the clues. (I didn’t even know lamp-posts had numbers, but it seems they do.)
For a few brief moments, I felt I was in the right place, a location being sought by carloads of people, a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, a desideratum.
This was a single bright spot on the otherwise bleak week, so I’ll end with a picture of a celandine I snapped last week when it was a single bright spot on the lawn. (It was the lawn mower, not the Grim Reaper, that cut it off in its prime.)
don't confuse the narrator 