Slow Motion

          When the lady from the estate agency turned up as arranged, she appeared dejected, despite having been briskly cheerful when we had spoken over the phone the day before. “Sorry,” she said, “I’m upset. I had a family bereavement overnight.” I was taken aback and muttered, “Sorry to hear about that.” On reflection, it would have been more humane to add, “Would you like to talk about it?”, but we were strangers, so I kept my distance from her grief. Anyway, who comes up with lines like that outside of playscripts? I wasn’t expecting anything other than a professional transaction, so I fumbled for a response that managed to be polite but failed to be compassionate.

          We should always expect the unexpected. After all, “that’s life” is what we say. But when it comes to it, perhaps some individuals are better equipped than others to respond appropriately on the spur of the moment. Which reminds me of another recent incident in which the element of surprise got the better of me. It was the middle of a quiet afternoon and I was rousing myself from the sofa, where I had fallen into a newspaper-induced snooze. I am not sure whether I heard it or saw it first, but a squirrel entered the room from the adjacent hall and stopped abruptly by the door. In the moment that we looked at each other, an observer would have been hard pressed to tell which of us was the more astonished – though, that said, I have subsequently noticed that squirrels typically wear a perpetually astonished expression. Nevertheless, I was certain the squirrel did not expect to encounter me and did not want to be in the room with me. It had definitely ”barked up the wrong tree” – perhaps because there are no actual trees nearby.

          We sat, frozen for a second or two before we both panicked. The squirrel ran pell-mell around the furnishings, both vertically and horizontally, while I made a lunge for the door, thinking to confine the situation to one room. This caused the creature to hurl itself at the balcony windows, which I kept shut for fear of it leaping to a watery fate in the river below. (I now realise that it could have climbed the exterior wall of the building to the roof and safely down the other side.) Meanwhile, I hatched a plan: to throw a bath towel over it, wrap it up and release it through the bedroom window, whence it must have come. But throwing a towel over a fast-moving squirrel is nigh on impossible and I succeeded in the end only because it made a tactical error: it ended up in the kitchen sink, where it paused, apparently to consider its options, but just long enough for the towel to land. I carried my squirming bundle to the window and released it onto the ledge below it. Then I put the towel in the washer, for fear that it might now be contaminated by some animal virus that would cross the species barrier and cause a pandemic.

          With the excitement abating, I did belatedly think about why I had not captured the episode on video for release on social media, where it would have raised a few chuckles. Obviously, my old-fashioned wiring is too clunky for the modern equipment in my pocket. But perhaps that is not a bad thing, since it would be uncharitable to film an innocent creature’s distress for the entertainment of unsympathetic humans. I also took time to mull over my reaction to the unexpected encounter, which I had escalated into a ‘situation’. If I had simply picked up the newspaper and ignored it, the squirrel probably would have found its own way back to the window, without all the stress of the chase. Spontaneous decision-making may not be my strong point, but I’m quite good at hindsight.