It was being a very lovely day. A very lovely day. It's true that a greyhound had kidnapped me and my person had nearly ended up calling the police. It's true that a wolf had nearly eaten me. But it was a very lovely day.
You remember that. Next time you have a day in which you are kidnapped by a greyhound and nearly get eaten by a wolf. Remember. That though there might have been some difficult moments there can still be a great deal of blessing and beauty in a day. I could be moaning about my day. I could. I could say it was a very bad day indeed, what with the kidnap and the near death. I could then point to the heavy rain that began to fell during the events of the post ahead. I could even point to the fact that I nearly got eaten twice that day. And I could tell you it was a rubbish, rubbish day.
But I'm not going to do that. I'm going to tell you it was a lovely day. I met geese. I crossed the river on the back of a black swan. I saw some beautiful things. I spent time with my person and we were under natural light. We saw lots of plants and only one of them was one that could bring my person out in big blisters that need treating in hospital, just from one touch. [It could, but fortunately it didn't.] Yes, that plant is everywhere. My person says that she has seen far, far more of it this year than she has ever seen before. I think that's partly because my person has been outside far, far more this year than she ever has before. But I also know it's because that horrid evil weed is spreading quickly even though we also saw signs that people are trying to control it. We saw lots of giant hogweed that day and I had my picture taken with it and I even considered writing an educational blog to teach you the difference between giant hogweed and cow parsley. You can find that out for yourself though.
It was a lovely day. How could I pretend it wasn't when we saw pretty places like these. These two photos we taken in the same place. We were hardly out of the major urban areas. In some ways we weren't. If you were to look away from the river you would see housing estates beginning quickly and they rose up to Pendleton and Salford Shopping City. We were still central. But it was very pretty. And it would get prettier - we found a massive park that's officially in Bury. Just look at this.
And just look the other way. How are you supposed to drive your boat up the river Irwell when it does things like this?
Oh, okay. Just one giant hogweed picture. Here's some. Somebody has been here trying to control it. When we went back to the river with Winefride we saw that somebody had been working very hard to control it. They chop off the top of the stalk - which might be several metres tall - and pour poison inside to kill the plant. You can't just spray this plant with something from the garden centre. You have to pull out the big poison guns. And even with all that work there was a lot of hogweed, with new hogweed sprouting everywhere. I found it quite scary. Maybe next year we'll go back and have a look to see whether all the hard work has worked or whether the entire river Irwell is just a mass of giant hogweed with it's evil stalk that oozes demonic fury from every patch of Satanic red. I don't like giant hogweed.
Fortunately it's not all hogweed. Here's the river, the path and another bridge. I like bridges. That's another reason we need to go back. So I can have my picture taken with every single bridge we pass. I'm not even in this photograph. We could start walking the Irwell at the Manchester Ship Canal and I could have my picture taken with the bridges and then I could find out about them all. I'm sure my person wouldn't mind doing that for me even though there are so many other places she wants to explore. [Yes Blob, I think I'd prefer to explore them than to revisit this walk.]
A very lovely day. But then we had an episode that I don't care to repeat. If ever I get to see the bridges again I don't know what we're going to do about this section. Maybe there's a path on the other side of the river and we wouldn't have to pass this way. Or maybe I could just hide in the bag and keep an extremely tight hold of Winefride's reins. I don't want to lose her.
The walk had been going so well apart from the kidnapping, near eating, scary geese, scary hogweed and getting lost before we had even found the river. It was a lovely day.
But. Then up ahead I saw this creature appearing from the undergrowth:
A tiger. A tiger!
It wasn't on fire like the burning bright one in the poem. And I didn't know whether or not it possessed any fearful symmetry because at that point I could only see one side of its body.
A tiger. A most fearsome beast.
But this one looked quite friendly and I decided that I should have my picture taken with the tiger. My person got her camera out and pointed it at the tiger and I got myself into the shot and my person pressed the shutter. This was the result. I was smiling and very happy because I hadn't ever met a tiger before. It was all going so well. I thought.
There warning signs were there. Just look at the tiger's face. Can you see how it had changed its expression between the first photo and the second? The difference is small, just micro-expressions. But I can see them and I'm sure a well trained human would be able to see them too.
I should have paid better attention.
Because it was at this point everything went a bit wrong.
The tiger suddenly pounced, a massive shape landed on me and for the second time that day I was held in the mouth of a fearsome animal.
That would probably be enough to spoil most people's days. But not me. It was a very lovely day even though I spent some of it in the mouth of a tiger and some more of it involved in a three way fight. Me and my person versus a tiger. Two against one. That hardly seems fair. It's true that the tiger's claws are bigger than my person's and that I haven't got any claws at all. But it still seems a very unbalanced contest.
I don't need to tell you the details of our battle. Maybe another time. Not now because I need to go out soon with my person and she's not even dressed yet.
All you need to know is that eventually I got free and that the tiger crawled back into the undergrowth.
It was a most frightening experience so you can probably see why I wouldn't want to walk along that path again. I don't want to be dinner for a tiger or for anyone else. I am not anyone's dinner.
I confess that though it was a very lovely day I felt a bit sorry for myself. I'd got lost. I'd found my route shut due to a closed footpath. (Not that this stopped us in Chester-le-Street when we ignored the closed footpath signs. And then later got lost twice.) I'd had my way blocked by an army of geese. I'd been nearly eaten by a wolf. I'd been kidnapped by a greyhound.
And now this. The indignity of it all!
It was a very lovely day but at that moment I started to cry and cry and cry and I kept asking one question and I was wailing loudly, asking my person again and again:
Why? WHY? WHY?
It was a fair question. Why? There didn't seem to be any good answer. Because there wasn't one. Sometimes bad things happen to good small pink soft toys.
My person sat down on the riverbank with me and held me tightly. We rocked together and she squeezed me. And she sang a quiet song to me. We rocked gently and I buried my face into my person and cried some more. Slowly as she stroked me I calmed down. I still didn't know why things kept trying to eat me. We stayed like that on the riverbank for quite some time before I felt able to continue my walk.
We were glad that I was able to continue. And we set off once again along the Irwell.
It was at about this point that the rain begin to fall more. My person looked at the map on her phone and discovered that quite soon we would reach a road and that there was a bus stop not too far away from our crossing point.
We would get to the road. Wait for a bus. Go back to the home. Get dry. Drink tea. And relax until my creator arrived and then relax some more.
That seemed like an excellent plan to me. And it seemed like a top rated plan to my person.
An excellent plan.
A plan that would fail. Catastrophically.
But that's something for my next blog post. Don't worry. We didn't die or get eaten. But we did get very wet. [No Blob, we didn't get very wet. I got very wet. You hid away in my waterproof bag and made me carry you through the bad weather.]
[1662 words]
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