It's been a busy start to Autumn here at Under the Oaks, what with the newly revised edition of L.W. King’s Carrie’s Legacy hitting the shelves this week and two new covers also being revealed to boot. So, apologies for the lack of blogs recently, for reasons which we hope you understand.
And now as we enter the darker side of the year it seems the ideal time to snuggle into an armchair and scare ourselves silly with a good old-fashioned ghost story. Of course, I highly recommend my new book ‘Mill
house’ which is available for pre-order on Kindle, before its official release date on the 9th of October.
Well now all of that is out of the way we can move on to yet another of my inspirational stories.
As authors, we are constantly seeking out ways to aid us with our writing, whether it be people-watching while we sit outside a café enjoying a warm beverage or taking notes from what we see in nature as we watch the everchanging landscape that surrounds us, building stories from what we observe. Louise however, many years ago started to take this observation to the maximum when she started to put voices to all the many different animals that visit our garden, something which both myself and the children I might add find hilarious. Since I observe my wife a lot, I thought that her comical narrative descriptions of what sparrows actually thought about the quality of the birdseed or what crows talked about as they hung around on telephone cables would make a fantastic storyline for a book, which I hope to be published just in time for the festive season.
With this in mind, today's story is of course to do with animals.
It was October 2017 and we decided to take a short break in the beautiful Welsh countryside, Bala to be precise. Full of excitement we headed off on the 5 ½ hour drive straight through the centre of Wales. Our destination was an old, converted barn filled with antiquities and strange embroidered pictures hanging from the walls, which neither of us could decipher. But along with the old furniture and hand-sewn images came something else, a cat! Louise of course being the lover of all things animal-related, fell in love with the said cat and invited her new friend to spend the weekend with us. Our mini break away, supposedly just to be the two of us in the rolling landscape of Wales now amounted to three. The cat, now named Guinevere by Louise (well we were in Wales) took our hospitality to the absolute maximum, as it drank bowl upon bowl of milk before retiring to bed on a chair in the bedroom. After the long journey neither of us could be bothered with cooking so headed into the local town in search of fish and chips. Mistake? Possibly, as the menu in the local fish and chip shop stated only that it was fish and did not give a specific clue as to what type of fish it may even be! Taking a chance, we ordered our food and headed back to the secluded old barn on the side of a hill. Our reservations about the fish were correct, it wasn’t the best we had ever tasted but good old Guinevere was more than happy to give it a go.
That night sitting in bed we were checking our route for the following day's excursion with Guinevere happily curled up asleep next to us. And then the unthinkable happened, as we sat munching on Maltesers while studying the map, the cat, dear old Guinevere who was sleeping off her overindulgence in our generosity turned over and emptied her bowels! The sound and smell that the dear cat omitted were unbearable, not to mention the mess that poor Louise laboriously attempted to clean up from the sheet. Sadly, we never did return to the barn for a second stay, the embarrassment surrounding the stained sheet and the thought that maybe the owners would not believe that it was down to a cat put us off somewhat. However, it just so happens that we were making a video journal at the time of Guinevere’s unfortunate accident, a video that I am sure if you search YouTube will still find to this day!
Until the next time, keep smiling!
Darron x
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