What could be more ordinary than a bowl full of dried black eye beans soaking before cooking? Not a lot I’d say. Which is strange because there have been a number of very strange things going on in our world today.

At 2am this morning we awoke to the sounds of a violent argument outside in our street. Trust me, our street rarely has pedestrians passing along it during daylight hours and at night, the most likely people to venture out in the dark are DM and me when we go to the pub. Even that is as rare an event as Britain winning a gold medal at the winter Olympics. Since our straitened lifestyle kicked in, we go up the pub maybe three or four times a year. You might expect to be woken up so rudely if you live in a town or city but not out here in the fag end of nowhere.

Hearing screaming and shouting between someone we’re now intimately acquainted with as “Hayley” and an unnamed man, not to mention a speakerphone conversation with another unknown male, was bizarre to say the least. The gist of their argument was that he’d crashed the car and freaked her out. He was yelling that his loss was a lot worse than hers because he’d now got to buy a new car but she’d obviously had quite enough of him and his remonstrations and was determined to walk off down the hill in the pitch dark with no torch and no high viz. Insanity.

The road is single track and has high granite walls on both sides. If a car comes towards a pedestrian the pedestrian has nowhere to go. This is especially a problem at night when cars are lulled into a false sense of security and take advantage of the fact that they can see headlights if there is a car coming towards them. As a result, they often travel fast along the lane at night. Couple that with the sad fact that some local drivers take liberties with the drink-drive laws around here because the chances of being caught are tiny given our remoteness so it’s more than possible they’re not very capable. We’ve been caught out by such combinations of circumstances ourselves as we’ve walked back and forth to the pub and were within a couple of inches of being run over a year or so ago hence our gorgeous high viz jacket purchases that we now wear religiously when we go out on foot.

Anyway, we were both standing in front of the window watching them and “Hayley” set off down the road to cries of “Hay-ley, Hay-ley, come back to , don’t be stupid.” I have no idea what he planned to do in the village as the pub would certainly have been shut and there wouldn’t be anywhere to stay. After a few minutes of shouting, the male also went marching off down the hill. We’re not sure what happened next but we think the same pair came back up the hill an hour or so later.

It was a strange and not at all ordinary late-night incident only surpassed by the incident with the police knocking on our door at midnight…but that’s for another day.