Singular life
In a hole
Petronella Wyatt
My friends have accused me of hubris. They say last week's column was an exercise in pathetic attention-seeking vainglory. Personally I have always rather liked hubris. Nice chap. Unassuming until he gets you between the eyes. Better name than osmo- sis, too, who always sounds like a sad Sixties crooner with a cupboard full of velveteen kaftans embroidered in gold thread. Hubris is interesting too because you don't realise you are committing it until you suddenly fall down a great yawning hole. Funny that, because a few months ago I wrote that our house was being under- pinned and that builders had started work in the garden. It would be an understatement to say that its aesthetic possibilities had been destroyed. Thank goodness it isn't a hot summer. No one wants to lounge around on burnished rubble, especially in what I usual- ly lounge around in. Far worse, the builders tend to leave things lying around in the gar- den and don't tell you. Occasionally they remove things and don't tell you. Little things like the front door steps.
So, on Monday night, I stepped out of the front door and suddenly fell down a yawning great hole. Life was imitating Greek myth. My hubris had tripped me up. There I was scrabbling around in the dark like an archaeologist whose overweening ambition and idiocy has led him to a deep pit from which there is no escape. Scream- ing, though an undignified option, seemed the only recourse. 'Help,' I cried, 'I've fall- en down a hole.'
My hubris must have been huge indeed for this plainest of pleas was variously interpreted as 'I've lost a sole' (whether fish or leather was unclear) and 'I've found a mole.' But making oneself understood from beneath layers of broken brick is tricky at the worst of times.
I have spent many nocturnal hours out- side of late. It has not been so much a case of 'Come into the garden, Maud' as yet another bleeding burglary. Not that there is anything left to steal except the house itself. Last week someone tried to steal that. Or at least bits of it. At 11 o'clock a loud thump disturbed my 'rest' (a re-run of The Magnificent Seven on cable). The secu- rity lights flashed on with a, erm, flash. Bravely (quaking with fear), I seized my late father's swordstick from a cabinet. The blade stuck in the scabbard. I pulled at it, once, twice, three times. Meanwhile, the burglars were tearing down the house, brick by brick. I called 999. You are in a queue, they said. How British. By the time I opened the front door, the burglars had fled. They had attempted to seize a gar- goyle off the wall of the house and had dropped it on the grass. A very large piece of cement and stucco was still attached to its grimacing head.
The following day Cornwall declared war on me. This was over my article of 24 June in which I ventured that the Cornish, despite being delightfully picturesque and inhabiting the most beautiful county in Britain, were a teeny bit idle. I also pointed out that, apart from the Tresanton Hotel in St Mawes, Cornwall was one of the last redoubts of luncheon meat, tinned peaches and Spar supermarkets that reek of wax and creosote. Soon afterwards I began receiving Cornish clotted cream fudge in the post. A bite of the first piece tasted strangely bitter. Good God, was it arsenic?
For the past four days, every radio and television station in Cornwall have been on the telephone. They say that Cornwall has rarely been so enraged since Trelawney: 20,000 Cornishmen want to know the rea- son why. I may, it seems, be summoned before some committee to answer charges of 'racism'. As Sam Goldwyn used to say, 'Don't call me, I'll call you.'
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