The fences were always tall, but the old ones were rotten and had holes in them. The fences are on top of an ivy clad embankment which makes their tops about 10' above our drive.
Inside the tall fences, beside the bottom of the drive, is a shed with a flat roof. Even humans can't see it from outside the fence. Sitting on the shed's flat roof I can observe the world outside the fence without being noticed by anyone - just my eyes and ears might show over the fence to anyone looking closely. No one looks closely; they don't know about the shed.
Sometimes I use the shed to play a trick on F & Mr B. They were in the drive so I invited them to play 'chase'. When they finally joined in I raced down the drive, vaulted up the ivy embankment on Mike's side, and shinnied up a tree that overhangs his garden. Then, with barely a pause, I launched myself. I could tell from F's face that it had created the desired effect. She thought I'd thrown myself out of a tree about 18-20' above the ground. I landed on the shed.
This is another part of the same tree that overhangs the invisible shed; this part overhangs the bottom of our drive.
Now look closely.......yes that's me!
That was the day F & Mr B had the long ladder out cleaning the gutters on our house. The sun was shining. I was done with sunbathing on the car roof; chase and my shed leap seemed like a good idea.
You can do your own reading on what happens when the ancient part of the vertibrate brain takes over from the neo-cortex. The ancient 'fight or flight' part is the mode that I switch into for 'chase' - the mad, not rationally controlled mode, what Mr B calls the 'funny 5 minutes'. It's fun giving in totally to wild instinct, but I occasionally 'come to' wondering how in the world (or why in the world) I got here.
So it was with that tree. I must have gone up the wrong part and when the adrenaline drained away there I was 25 feet above the drive; 8 metres of plein air between me and concrete.
Hmmmmm..so then there was getting down. 'Any of you read Winnie-the-Pooh? Why Tiggers don't climb trees, and all the excuses as to why, having got up there with Baby Roo, Tigger couldn't get them down from the tallest of the 6 pine trees? Well, all of those.
F & Mr B were rolling about laughing by that stage. I could even see tears coming out of their eyes. I'm glad I cheered them up so much but I couldn't hang around up there all day. I gave them a bit of a talking to but that only made them laugh even harder.
"He's stuck," they laughed.
Stuck?!
I'll give them stuck. They've got a long ladder on the other side of the drive. They can't climb anything without one. The least they could do is let me let me have a dignified descent.
The ladder was eventually moved but it didn't look all that stable on the sloping drive, so I stayed put. "You've got to have better options than that! You wouldn't trust your life with that, so why should I?"
Then to my surprise F appeared carrying a big stripey canvas bucket with a wire hoop in the top to keep it open. She put on big leather gloves and inched her way up the ladder. When she got to the top she swung the bucket round the tree and without hesitation I climbed in, sat down and waited.
There followed some swearing and scrabbling, and a bit of desperate nervous laughing. I must have taken her by surprise. She had her arms around either side of the tree holding me and the bag and it turned out she couldn't hold me and the bag in one hand while she arranged herself in a balanced position with both arms on one side of the tree in order to get me back on the ladder side.
It's amazing what scared humans can achieve if they believe they are going to fall off a tall ladder and land on concrete with a mad, clawing cat falling on their face.
I'll teach them to laugh.
Note from F: T climbed into the bag like someone catching a bus, easy as you like as if we provided this elevator service on a daily basis. The bag normally stores my knitting wool stash and he's never been known to climb into it before. Wheelbarrows are normally his thing.
When he climbed in I had one hand on the rim and one under the bottom. He stepped directly onto and sat down on the bottom hand. It was a great steadying platform but had no hold on either bag or cat and the hand holding the rim, wearing a scaffolding glove, didn't have a grip I'd trust to hold the weight of T when the bag swung clear so I needed to work my grip round to one of the rope handles.
Throughout it all Tigger sat there as if on some sight-seeing tour; a Tigger version of a cable car ride perhaps - calm as you like,
There's trust for you.
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