Things That We Fear.
Good Day,
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This is a mellow Sunday morning.
A gentle drizzle of rain outside and all the birds are squabbling over the bread on the wall as usual.
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It just shows you what disgusting stuff they usually eat, if they are going to such lengths to get their bits of stale bread.
Urgh, probably stuff with many legs and crunchy bits.
Hey, come to think of it, we can’t talk, because that sounds just like a lobster doesn’t it!
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What brought this thought to mind was something that I felt compelled to do when I was on my way to bed last night.
Big H and I had been sitting companionably, just reading our library books, and I decided that it would be a good idea to get ready for bed and then when I was finally sleepy I could just snap the bedside light off and drift away .
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A good plan, but when I was going to get into bed I had a terrific compulsion to check underneath the bed first.
I tried to ignore it but in the end I was forced to do it. Of course there was nothing there at all. And what had I been planning to do if there was!
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Then, as if that wasn’t daft enough, I found myself just having a check behind the curtains too.
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What on earth is this.
Is it simply too many Stephen king and Dean Koontz novels, or am I getting paranoid, or it it early onset senility as I pitiably slip back into my childhood, along with all of it’s strange fancies.
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When I was a child I did end up with a problem about dangerous things that live under the bed.
This was partly due to my own dear brother.
He would run into my room in the mornings at the weekends, to tell me to be really careful about getting out of bed, because he could see something under there just waiting for me to lower my bare feet to the floor.
It always ended up frightening me because although you think he’s telling lies, what if he is not.
I was too frightened to bend over and look under the bed just in case IT bit off my nose.
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There I would sit for ages, torn by fear and indecision, until I finally leaped as far out of bed as I could and raced out of the room.
I must have provided the evil boy with endless pleasure.
He is almost three years older than me, and that makes a big difference when you are very small.
No wonder I did that thing in his slipper!
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One of my earliest memories is of screaming my head off in terror because of a huge monster.
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My cot was behind the bedroom door, in my old long, narrow bedroom.
I was sitting there quite peacefully when the door suddenly burst open and banged loudly against the cot.
My dummy fell out with shock.
Then a huge white monster, with a black top on it’s head, rushed in making a horrible scary noise and waving its arms up in the air.
It had mad protruding eyes and very long gnarly hairs coming out of it’s nose, which had bloody red nostrils.
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I went berserk and was screaming and howling, backed up panic stricken against the cot bars, helpless.
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Then my mother appeared and shouted at the monster, very bravely.
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It turned out to be my own 6’4″ father who had covered himself in a big white sheet and jammed a black beret onto his head to hold the sheet into place firmly.
He had used his artistic talents to draw two very realistic eyes, with red veins, onto the bottom of two egg cups which he had screwed into his eye sockets.
He had also stuck a big red hairy-tailed radish up each nostril.
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Mum was furious with him.
I think that he had had a drink and it had seemed like a good idea at the time.
I can remember snivelling on for hours, taking frequent big, shivery breaths.
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It’s no wonder I can be strange sometimes!
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I was talking to a friend yesterday and she told me about buying a most beautiful pink dress for a little girl and then being quite bemused when the frightened child had a tantrum and refused to wear it because it had ‘buttons’ on it.
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Some few people apparently hate to see peas and would rather die than eat them, while most of us are not too keen on spiders and creepy crawlies.
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I am not so frightened of spiders as I was once upon a time, because of something that happened when I first got married.
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I was in bed when I clearly heard something walking across the wooden bedroom floor.
It was a massive black spider, made even worse by the shadow it threw because of the bedside lamp.
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I leapt out of the opposite side of the bed and grabbed my hairspay.
Then, I am ashamed to say, I sprayed the poor creature until it was dripping.
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Poor thing!
I felt so guilty that I picked it up and rushed it into the bathroom.
I then washed all of the lacquer off under the tap and put it onto a spread out facecloth.
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After worriedly looking at it for a few minutes, I put it on it’s back, gathered up the legs on its left into my left hand and the right legs into my right, and then moved all of its legs rythmically inwards and outwards to try and give it artificial respiration of some kind.
It lay all night upon the facecloth but I had murdered it.
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After that incident I began putting all unwanted house guests into a glass and shaking them out into the garden…..not the human ones of course because I don’t have any glasses big enough!
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What about you.
What are you afraid of?
If you would like to share your fears with us all, please do feel free to leave a comment.
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J x.
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