hellhounds and chicken defectors

this week at the pightle, the hellhound gets subdivided and we gain a chicken

fig 1: aforementioned hellhound

Hello and welcome to the Odde Chronicle. My name is Celandine, which is not true. I have chosen to obscure my real identity due to a longtime fascination with aliases and alter egos, and also because I find it thrilling to lie on the internet. Much of what I plan to write about is in fact true, but you had better assume I am lying about everything, just to be safe.

I have begun this unusual publication to document my unusual life with my two partners, Nettle and Dandelion, in our medieval hall house. I shall not give any of us any genders as I don't find gender very interesting. I shall not give the house a gender either, but I shall give it a name: Oddements Pightle. It is very old and very crooked and we ended up here by mistake. We also live with two creatures, a hellhound from the underworld and a dog of great length whom I shall refer to as The Long Tube of Freckled Chaos, or TLTOFC for short.

I suppose you might like to know a bit more about me, Celandine. First I was born. Since then my life has been a dazzling variety show of illnesses with a couple of intermissions where we all could buy overpriced ice cream and try to wrap our heads around the story so far. I encountered Nettle in America when I turned up late for a seminar and had to borrow their syllabus. They asked if I believed in ghosts, I gave them a key to my apartment, and then we moved to the UK and tried to be normal, which resulted in us renting a very damp cottage on the side of a haunted loch in Scotland and accidentally acquiring a hellhound. Needless to say we went on to fail more and more spectacularly at being normal. This futile endeavour eventually culminated in us living in the attic of a national trust property and getting Dandelion and TLTOFC. The hellhound loved Dandelion - a rare occurrence - which meant we had to keep them. TLTOFC and the hellhound maintain an uneasy truce except sometimes when they unite to partake in unauthorised activities such as murder.

So that was how it was. It was all very nice but then I got spectacularly ill and my legs stopped working and everything fell apart and in the end we all landed in a heap at Oddements Pightle. My legs work again now. Now you're all caught up.

This week at the Pightle we had to go to the vet to get part of the hellhound removed. Upon arrival in the vet car park the hellhound immediately escaped its collar and scuttled under a wheelie bin like a rat, which meant I was required to sort of herd it out and rugby tackle it while the vet techs watched in mild consternation. I then felt obliged to defend my decision to circle "no" on the bit of the consent form that asks if your dog is likely to bite; the hellhound and I have a pact where it loves me in exchange for room and board but it has no such agreement with the vet techs and thus made sure to demonstrate all of its fangs. In the end they successfully removed the cancerous bit of the hellhound and informed us that it was cured, which we were very pleased to hear as we are fond of our hellhound. The hellhound had of course been unconcerned about its fate as it knew Satan would protect it. They gave us some painkillers for the hellhound's recovery, not realising that it does not feel physical pain but only anger and wrath. All of the staff at our vet are probably now cursed.

Another occurrence at the Pightle this week was the arrival of a defector chicken from next door. Our neighbours are very christian and very agricultural and they take great pains to instil the importance of such activities as mowing the lawn endlessly and cutting down trees with chainsaws in their seven children. The agricultural christians seem to find us rather distressing due to the fact that they can't work out why there are three of us or which of us is supposed to be who. Aside from this our garden is overgrown and jungly and we barely mow the lawn let alone cut down trees with chainsaws, and also Nettle and I have the tendency to break into vaguely druidic drumming sessions at a moment's notice, all of which appears to run counter to their sensibilities. The hellhound did its part to assist in neighbourly relations by immediately murdering two of the christian chickens upon our arrival at Oddements Pightle.

Despite all this history, one of the christian chickens has left the religion and opted to regularly roost in our lavender. This is a questionable decision on several fronts (see above: chicken murder), but this chicken clearly feels more spiritually at home on this side of the fence as it arrives gothically every morning at 2am, at which point the hellhound stands on its hindlegs and snarls out the window to herald it. We tried to eat one of the eggs but it was fertilised and gave us a good jump scare.

This concludes this week's events. My aim is to write every week, but this may or may not occur as we live in complete chaos and sometimes fail to notice the passing of time. Oddements Pightle is always finding new ways to malfunction as a modern dwelling or acquire new non-human residents, and it is crammed with the junk of my forebears. We are in the process of trying to clear out some of this junk so that we can cram it with our own junk. This is what is known as personal development.

Thank you for reading and wishing you an odde week.

Celandine