Shoot A Poisoned Arrow

Warming Up

8497/21416

World Book Day and my daughter showed which parent she prefers by dressing up as a character dressed up as an ice cream from Cafe Chaos by Catherine Wilkins, rather than a cancerous testicle from Can I Have My Ball Back?

I thought Ernie would show some loyalty, but he wanted to be Dog Man (but we couldn’t find his mask) but he made the controversial decision to be Harry Potter instead and I hope that all right-thinking people cancel him for that.

Excitingly Catie’s new Cafe Chaos book also arrived today and it will be out very soon. Please buy all her books so that I can finally retire and stop trying to do comedy.

Only speak German? Not a problem, you can get most of them in German. Sadly you won’t be able to understand what I am writing and thus will never know.

We had more people under our floorboard this week (the gas men had been there in January), this time some exterminators checking whether rodents were getting into next door’s crawl space via ours. Our crawl space was rodent free (and so is next door’s now), but we had had to take everything out of our meter cupboard again so they could get access.

I was putting it all back in again today when I found an item that I don’t recall taking out of there. It’s a quite nicely made native American style arrow. It’s the kind of thing that Ernie likes to make, but he never does it quite as artfully as this. I couldn’t throw it out, in case it was his, but it’s quite a spooky thing to find in your house.

Like I say I hadn’t knowingly taken it out of that cupboard (and I’ve emptied the space a couple of times in recent weeks), though there are a couple of items left by the previous owners so it might have been bundled in with them and fallen out. Possibly the exterminators had found it under the floorboards and rescued it. Though I was with them all the time and they didn’t mention it. Which I think they would have. “There’s no rats under there, but there does seem to be a Native American burial ground - that’s probably quite bad luck.”

I showed the arrow to Ernie and it wasn’t his, but he did immediately wonder if the house was built on top of a place where Native Americans might have been firing arrows. I told him that I wasn’t sure if Native Americans had made it to Hitchin.

I just googled it and AI tells me “Pocahontas did not come to Hitchin. While she visited England in 1616–1617, her time was spent in London, Brentford, and finally Gravesend, Kent, where she died and was buried.” Might she have fired an arrow as she died, like Robin Hood and it ended up in the cellar of our house?

Our house wasn’t built until the 1900s, but who knows how long an arrow can stay in the air.

Likely it was made by another weapon obsessed child who used to live here, or maybe bought back home from the US as a souvenir.

Impressive flint work

That doesn’t explain how it got out of the cupboard without me spotting it though.

Anyway, a slightly spooky occurrence of an apparating arrow

I put it in the bin. That probably won’t make the Native American ghosts of Hitchin very happy.

Maybe there’s a kids book in that though!

There’s a new Craven Newsround for you to endure. You can tell it’s live because I get some grain bar bits caught in my throat and teeth and just have to carry on. That’s one of the exciting things about live TV. This ep will probably become as famous as that little girl walking in on her dad in the news.