Distracted

I was telling the boss about my impending visit to the Norman house at Hemingford Grey, star of the Green Knowe books, and mentioned its extreme hauntings. And of course that developed into a ghost conversation. I had the usual hearsay (seesay?) contributions to make, friends who swore they'd experienced supernatural events and visitors, but she topped them with ease. There's a road between Snape and Woodbridge that passes through Rendlesham Forest where Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder General during the Civil War, is often seen swathed in an expansive cloak astride a huge horse. This man was evil incarnate in his day, and in one two-year period he was responsible for the deaths of 300 Suffolk women accused by him of being witches. He was buried just over the River Stour in Essex but doesn't rest easily in his grave apparently. Anyway, on one stretch of this road, by day or night but far more frighteningly in the dark, Nick has experienced an atmosphere so dreadful, so unbearable that she often has to stop in the next town to recover. She is no lily-livered faint-hearted fluffy dame, that she's not. Once she caught a glimpse of something to the side of her car and, turning to look against her will, saw a ghastly figure looming against the window following her closely as she drove at crazy speed to get away. Intrigued, I said I'd love to see something like this but No! she said sharply, it is not pleasant. Nevertheless she's agreed to drive me along the road one evening so that I can see what happens. I suspect she's particularly sensitive to these things.

Despite these distractions I managed to see a client and speak to several on the phone. But maybe because of them I discovered I'd shredded one set of details without recording them on the system. I sweated, I looked inside the shredder when the coast was clear, to no avail. I tried 1471 to get her number, but this didn't work. Slowly I remembered who she was, where she lived, what her issue was. The only missing detail in the end was her phone number which we didn't need in this case. Phew. Panic over. In future I'll steer away from the shredder until I've double checked everything. You can't be too careful, especially with a "familiar" for a manager.