Free The Widow's Tale by Mick Jackson Page B

minute! I’m bereft already. OK. It’s not that my not having it would make me bereft. It’s the fact that if I’d actually found it/bought it/owned it, some tiny fraction of my pain might have been erased.
    And it’s not as if just any old book of Holbein prints will replace it. Because now it is not about Holbein or even that particular edition, but that particular individual book. Well, I’m going to have to change the bloody subject, because this isn’t helping. My point is that it needs to be the book that I saw the day before yesterday. And if it doesn’t magically reappear in the bookshop in the immediate future, then I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do.
    To make matters worse I had a prang on my way home. Some of the lanes round here are so bloody narrow. I’d spotted another car coming towards me. So I did the decent thing and pulled over into one of those little passing places. And the arrogant bastard just flew straight by, without even raising a hand to say thank you. I must’ve been so annoyed, what with him and the bloodyHolbein, that when I pulled away I did so with just a hint of irritation and caught the nearside wing in the hedge. And when I reversed, to try and extricate myself, I was perhaps a little cavalier with my steering and I heard the distinct clunk of car making contact with something solid, hidden away beneath the foliage. And the more I went backwards and forwards and lost my temper the more scraping and squealing I could hear as the car rubbed up against whatever was in there.
    When I got back to the village I didn’t have the nerve to have a proper look at it. I just parked it right in the corner, with the damaged wing facing the bushes so that no one else could see it either. Perhaps if I leave it there long enough and do my best not to think about it, it might miraculously heal itself.
    *
    To try and calm myself down I went for a tramp out along the saltmarshes. I’d gone about half a mile before the whole path was blocked with bloody twitchers. I’ve spotted the odd one or two hanging about since I’ve been up here but today they were out in full force.
    It’s never struck me before but they really are a sort of ornithological paparazzi, with their telephoto lenses and their waistcoats with all the little pockets and sandwiches and their little fold-up stools.
    As I squeezed past them I thought to myself, I am not going to ask what all the fuss is about. They’re like children. It would only encourage them.
    The other day, someone in the village told me how,not that long ago, a bunch of birders gave some tiny bird they were chasing a seizure. It’d wound up in Norfolk by mistake and before you knew it word got round the twitching community and whole minibuses of them were spilling out onto the lanes. And they chased the little thing up and down the place with such determination that in the end its poor little heart just packed in. So they all had to climb back in their minibuses and go home again.
    Apparently, the really rare birds that everyone gets so excited about are just an anomaly. They’ve been blown off course by some freak wind, so they’re not even in pairs. Which means there’s no prospect of them breeding, and no chance of them being blown back from whence they came. So they’re just stuck out here, on the winter marshes of north Norfolk. A situation which has an eerie familiarity to it.

I seem incapable of stringing two decent
    I seem incapable of stringing two decent nights’ sleep together. Last night I was awake for a good couple of hours. As if what my body and soul need right now is a two-hour intermission to their slumbers. And, let me tell you, 3 a.m. in late January is a very lonely place to be.
    I could have got up. It’s meant to be better for you – to make yourself a cup of tea, or have a bath, or do more or less anything. I’ve forgotten the rationale behind it.