Something old and ancient and of the deepest, darkest soil.
As I have performed my daily security checks around Grindstone Towers I have encountered weird totems left out for me. Strange vegetables left in odd but prominent places.
I’m not talking peas or legumes. I am talking root vegetables. Turnips. Swedes. Mangelwurzels.
Mangelwurzels especially.
I have found no less than four of these left on pillar bases, at the tops of stairs and placed strategically in doorways so that they are hard to avoid.
It is hard not to take these portents personally though the cryptic message they contain could be meant for anybody I suppose, not necessarily me.
Wikipedia tells me that as far as mangelwurzels are concerned their “contemporary use is primarily for cattle, pig and other stock feed” though they can be fed to humans when the root is young.
What is a young root? A rootlet? Isn’t that a quickie in Australian slang?
Plainly someone feels that I am of bovine persuasion. It is hard not to interpret that as some kind of negative feedback.
Or course, I could be misreading the situation. Maybe a regular has seen me scoffing my face with chocolate and feels that I should be eating more healthily and has taken to leaving me various food items that I could take home and incorporate into a nice stew. Sort of a low level piecemeal Red Cross food parcel service.
I admit I have been surveying the visitors to the Library contained within Grindstone Towers trying to identify the potential reader of the large print version of “Fifty Shades Of Gravy” but all to no avail. They are keeping their identity well hidden. It could be absolutely anybody.
Should I, of course, ever find a mangelwurzel in my bed I will know that the truth is I have offended the countryside mafia in some way and that my time on this good green earth is now at an end and I am about to be harvested forthwith (and not, alas, for my succulence). For as it is written: all flesh is like grass, and all of man's glory like the flower in the grass. The grass withers, and its flower falls...
But all I have at the moment is guess work. Guess work, speculation and conjecture. The truth is I don’t know what is happening only that it is strange and disturbing and nebulously sexual and I would welcome input from anybody at all on this matter.
Please carve all ideas and theorems into the back of a parsnip and send them to the usual address please.
Or alternatively just leave them out in the street for me to find in the morning.