A walk turns into a soggy misadventure for the Pages.
So, there we were the other day sitting round, enjoying an early morning cuppa, when Mrs P suggested the three of us should go for a walk.
Ordinarily, our companion the Helpful Heroine – so named because she always seems to save us from some predicament or another - would have jumped at the opportunity but she’s relatively recently undergone a bit of surgery so is easing herself back into the exercise thing.
She was also concerned that should it bucket down as was forecast, she may not be able to move fast enough to find shelter.
As for me, it looked to me like the sky was about to fall in at any time and I certainly didn’t want to get drenched either.
Besides, I’m not long out of surgery myself, and while I have been encouraged to take an ever-increasing number of steps each day, I made an executive decision that this particular day would not be one of them.
So it was a “no” from me, too.
Undaunted, Mrs P heads for the door on her own, nattily attired in figure-hugging walking gear which leaves me open-mouthed in wonderment and eternally thankful for God’s creative genius, if you get my drift.
She’s down the long driveway. Confident she’ll beat the rain. She’ll be walking past the cafe on the corner, she says, down the road, then she’ll cut across the park and come back via the road at the other side. Probably be an hour.
And with that, she’s gone. Nothing, it seems, will prevent My Beloved from striding out today.
Our coffee complete, Helpful Heroine goes off to do houseworky stuff and I go upstairs to our little unit to, er, consider my options. Which basically means I plonked myself down in a very comfy chair by the telly and promptly drifted off to sleep.
I am awoken later by the sound of heavy rain on the roof and Helpful Heroine’s hand on my shoulder, shaking me from the deepest of sleeps.
The urgency in her voice suggests something is amiss.
Naturally, the most recent thing in my sleepy brain is the match-winning try I just scored for the All Blacks in the World Cup final so it takes a second or two to regain my mental focus.
It turns out Mrs P has not returned from her stroll and Helpful Heroine is concerned she will be drenched and cold. So she’s going off in the car to search for her.
I check the clock. Sure enough, while I’ve been in the Land of Nod, Mrs P has been out a bit longer than expected.
Twenty minutes later, neither has returned, so now I’m a bit worried too.
Thankfully, it’s stopped raining so maybe I’ll get the crutches and get myself down to the bottom of the driveway – maybe 80 metres away – to see if they are near.
They aren’t. In fact, the only thing I can clearly see is the wall of water coming towards me as the heavy rain returns.
I try to get back to the comparative safety – and dryness – of the house but it’s slow going on one good leg on slippery concrete and by the time I get under the porch, I’m saturated.
As I’m standing there contemplating the difficulties involved in removing wet garments while hopping around on one good leg, Helpful Heroine pulls back up the drive. As she gets out of the car, I see she is drenched too.
Turns out she’d done a circuit of Mrs P’s route and hadn’t seen her on the roads on either side of the park so she’d stopped, got out and wandered down the pedestrian path just in case Mrs P was there, having fallen or something.
She’d got halfway along when God turned the rain on again and she hadn’t been able to get back to the car before she’d got a good soaking.
So now there are two cold and wet invalids standing shivering under the front porch.
And wouldn’t you know it, just then who should come strolling up the driveway without a care in the world? Mrs P.
Apparently, she’d made it as far as the cafe on the corner – about 100 yards away - just as the rain started to beat down. She’d taken shelter under the canopy out the front and some “nice man” had seen her through the window from inside and suggested she join him for a coffee while she waited for the weather to improve.
Naturally, not wanting to seem impolite, she’d accepted – which is obviously why she hadn’t been spotted by the search party – and decided to come home after so she didn’t get wet.
And then, as Helpful Heroine and I stood there still shivering and drenched to the core, she came up with a question, delivered so innocently, it left us open-mouthed in amazement.
“What have you guys been up to?”