Being students we spent a lot of time stoned or drunk, and we had plenty of time on our hands to engage in both activities (twelve hours of lectures a week!). Perhaps this explains why one day, in the long and narrow garden of the aforementioned house we had built a kind of 'miniature den'. this 'den' was made up of things we had found in the garden and the play room of the house; bits of wood, corrugated plastic, an old town. It looked like the kind of thing a child might make to camp out in, except in was far too small for even a child. You could carry it in your arms, except it would collapse of course. I have no idea why we had built this thing. Bored probably.
We forgot about the miniature den until one Friday night (or it may have been a Saturday night). We were drunk and stoned again, and had decided to have a look at the back garden in the gathering October cold. Someone pointed out that there was something in the den. we approached carefully. We could hear it move. Panicky movements. What had we caught? We approached slowly, so as not to scare the thing, when in reality it was because, drunk and stoned, we were all terrified. 'Whatever it is' said Sally's boyfriend 'it looks very frightened'. It was very dark, but, yes, I could definitely see some kind of movement. Had we caught a cat or a fox? I began to feel guilty, hoping it wasn't injured. It took us a further couple of minutes of scared crawling to reach the miniature den, which had now turned into some kind of trap, only to discover there was nothing there of course.
We had imagined the while thing.
We dismantled the miniature den slowly.
Just in case we imagined something else.
