Friday, February the 3rd, 2006

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Ten Days in a Ditch

Sometimes you just have to go and lie down in a ditch. That's what I did a week or so ago, and I have only just returned home. It is definitely time for a bath, but I have to say that my ditchdom was thoroughly splendid in every way.

For one thing, the ditch was a muddy one, muddy and puddle-strewn. And such gorgeous puddles! I studied puddles in an academic context some years ago, so I know, for example, that the Latin for puddle is lacusculus, which may more accurately be translated as little pool, but will do for our present purposes. Some of the lacusculi (or -ae) in my ditch were foul and deep. Others were shallow little things, almost vestiges of puddle. Each one had its own character, and I would have enjoyed counting them if I could remember how to count.

Did you notice how easily I said “my ditch”? I had not been lying in it for very long before it lost its anonymity and became my treasured, if temporary, possession, the way a medieval baron would boast of huge tracts of forest as being his “possessions”. It was in medieval times that a map was made of this area which shows some of the many ditches, and even gives them names. Some of the ditches have vanished, of course, while new ones have come into being, but there are a few that have existed for hundreds of years. I cannot be sure whether the ditch I chose was called Bentley or Abercrombie, so I may make a trip to the library to consult a facsimile of the old map after I have had my bath.

While I was lying in the ditch, I didn't give much thought to its name. I admired the puddles, as I have said, and I looked at the sky, at fugitive clouds, at birds in flight, particularly hummingbirds and wrens, for I have always favoured smaller birds. Large birds terrify me. I fear being pecked, and I begin to tremble. When I saw large birds overhead, I rolled over on to my front and looked at the mud, or closed my eyes.

With eyes shut I sometimes fell into a ditchy fitful sleep, but more often I allowed my mind to wander. I have been preoccupied lately with the fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol, having found a whole stash of illustrated booklets about him underneath the sink in the kitchen of my new set of rooms. Reading them avidly at a single sitting, I had been perplexed to discover that as well as being a champion sprinter, fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol had also won a number of medals and cups for the pole-vault. Thus, I had to alter my mental image of him, and I admit I found this difficult. For so long he had inhabited my brain breasting the tape after a particularly gruelling sprint, a bit like the famous photograph of Roger Bannister breaking the four minute mile at Iffley Road running track on the sixth of May 1954 (see below). I say “a bit like” because of course fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol sported a huge beard, a piratical eyepatch, and often—and mysteriously—had breadcrumbs in his hair. Nor should we forget that wherever he ran, he always took his little gaggle of pet poultry with him, which would wait, clucking, near the finishing line, much to the consternation of various athletics officials in their spotless blazers, some of them with whistles on lanyards around their necks, and some without.

So this was the eidolon of fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol that I had cherished for years and years, and now it had to be revised. I had to try to imagine him pole-vaulting. You may now be able to appreciate why I spent ten days lying in that ditch, Bentley or Abercrombie, without once getting bored. I will confess that I did not maintain my concentration uninterrupted, for there were many distractions. Leaving aside for a moment the birds, large and small, which I could see as they flew overhead, there were earthworms, beetles, the occasional mole, just one ant, all by itself, which had obviously strayed from its fellows, and a number of other life-forms which I did not recognise or cannot remember. There were gusts of wind which rippled the surfaces of the puddles. There was one spectacular rainstorm from which I sheltered by intoning a spell. And then there was Codrington.

I do not wish to dwell upon Codrington, for to do so is very painful. Suffice it to say that I cannot shake him off. He has been following me now for at least seventeen years. I thought I was safe in my ditch, and for the first four days I was. Then, at dawn on the fifth day, icy tentacles clawed at my heart as I heard the unmistakeable sound of his humming, his footsteps, his creaking bones. And there he was, clambering down into my ditch, squatting a few feet away from me, his gleaming black boots submerged in one of my favourite puddles. He pretended to ignore me, of course, as he always does. He hummed and creaked and creaked and hummed. It took a titanic effort of will for me to remain lying in my ditch, Bentley or Abercrombie, now supine, staring at the sky, and the birds in the sky, now prone, my face in the mud, summoning the image of fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol both sprinting and pole-vaulting, his poultry loyally at his side. And I succeeded. Yesterday, on my last day in the ditch, that new image swam before my eyes at the very moment that Codrington, with a final creak and hum, stood up, hoisted himself out of the ditch, and stalked away across the fields, frightening some cows as he passed, but allowing me some respite from his gruesome presence.

And now I am at home, and about to have a bath, and there is a mud-splattered envelope addressed to me resting on the mantelpiece. I know that the handwriting is Codrington's. He has left one of his communiqués. Do I read it or set fire to it? Or do I do neither, and go back to my ditch? What would fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol have done? He shall be my guide.