High Life

 

When I worked in London I lived in an apartment block. I had an apartment on the seventh floor overlooking a London park.

One day I got home and went out on the balcony of the apartment and found a snail. I was surprised. How did it get there? Did it climb all the way from the street below on the outside of the building? It must have taken him ages to get up to the seventh floor. Or did he get in through the front door of the building and took the elevator up to my apartment?

How did he manage to press the button No. 7 in the elevator? Or did someone do it for him?

My first instinct was to throw him out of the balcony, but I thought his shell would break as he hit the ground and he would die. 

So I thought of eating him as part of my meal. Not much of a portion, just one snail. Besides, I did not have any fresh garlic for the sauce.

So I decided to lower him gently to the street below in a small plant pot tied with a piece of string. The string was not long enough and he only reached floor No. 4 below me. So I pulled him back up again. Found a longer piece of string which I tied to the original string and lowered him gently to the street below. The stupid animal did not want to come out of the pot. I jiggled and shook the pot a few times by pulling and swinging the string. The snail would not come out.

At one point I thought he was out of the pot so I pulled the string up again. When I looked in the pot, the snail was still there.

All the time I was trying to work out how he got to my seventh floor balcony in the first place. 

Then a blackbird flew by and rested on the parapet of the balcony.

That's what must have happened. The blackbird had picked up the snail from the park and flew up here to eat it and clumsily dropped it into my balcony. No doubt he is back now searching for his snail. Well, he is not going to have it.

I imagined a wrestling type fight between me and the blackbird as to who will have the snail. Fortunately, he was a coward and flew away without putting up a fight.

I lowered the snail down to terra firma once more. I swung the pot and unfortunately the string broke. I now had a long piece of string but no pot. I pulled the string up and got all the way down to the street to retrieve my pot. The snail was no longer there. I wonder where it went.

In summer I usually had a nice pizza and beer sitting in that balcony looking down at the park opposite.  

One day I got in the kitchen for a few minutes and when I got back there was a bee in my glass of beer. There was not much beer in it, just a few drops. But enough to make the bee drunk. I retrieved it with a spoon and in order to revive it I put it in a cup of strong coffee. The stupid creature could not swim and died. Either that, or the coffee was too hot!