Oddness...

It’s rather odd. I’ve had a whole week of no weird stuff happening to me. Usually my life is a morass of strange connections and unusual happenings. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t go out to look for this stuff, it just sort of happens. I can’t actually remember when it started, unless you count the general oddness of the old farmhouse in which I spent a deal of my childhood, but more of that in a forthcoming book.

The oddness of my adult life just seems to have always been there. From black dogs to whistling wanderers there’s always something strange going on. Take for instance the whistling wanderer. I used to have a business involved in aviation wildlife management. My base was airside on a smallish international airport, in an old second world war ammunition store, complete with blast walls and huge steel doors. My days were long and did not end until the last daylight flight had arrived.  I would then hurry back, lock the equipment away and in the sudden quiet would often hear a noise. A slow, almost bored whistling. No tune, just notes, flowing, rising and falling. Not unpleasant. But as I was always completely and utterly alone, distinctly strange. To my mind it was the sound of a bored guard strolling round the buildings. But who knows.

An altogether more sinister experience was waking up in a cold sweat of dread at the same time of night – every single time I stayed in a particular house. Others experienced bed covers being pulled down and nameless fears. It was later learned that a stable lad hanged himself in that room many years before.

Some experiences are benign but weird. Take for instance the time I was driving home past a very remote cottage at around three in the morning. As I passed the gate I happened to look towards the house, there in the gateway, not five feet from me was a man standing bolt upright reading a newspaper – in the dark. I didn’t look in the mirror after I had passed, I knew the nocturnal reader would not be there.

Another local house seems beset with oddness, the (occasional) appalling smell at the bottom of the stairs (where the owner was found dead), the ringing doorbell – which has no cable to it and don’t even ask me about the security cameras!

More recently I’ve heard the sounds of cattle being herded in a deserted clearance village, observed strange dividing lights in the night sky and had a period of ‘corner of the eye’ people where they shouldn’t have been. Really, this is just the tip of the iceberg, my life seems full of this strange stuff (and I’m very much not alone round here) and it was having a period without any oddness that really caused me to think about it.

So, by now, you’ll probably think I’m a tad weird, prone to hysterics, maybe a bit fey? Well, perhaps, but I’m also a hairy arsed wood cutter and stalker so make of that what you will.

There’s more to heaven and earth and all that…