Forest demons and brutal murder: they happen.

It’s March.  I’m out walking at Braehour Forestry, trying to walk out the tension, the out-of-all-proportion emotional responses to relatively minor work issues; trying to exercise my way out of the back ache, the stiffness in my neck, the soaring blood pressure spikes at even a passing mention of certain work projects.

The day is damp.  The sky is dark grey, and sleety rain sputters on and off.  Frogspawn clots the ditches.  A stream of dark water mutters down into the black culverts that pass beneath the track, then swirls swiftly out the other side and away between the trees.  I am stuck in the misery of Work Stress.  I don’t know how to get away from it.  I keep walking, if I walk far enough, maybe I’ll leave it behind…  And if that doesn’t work, maybe I’ll have to batter it over the head with a blunt object and bury it deep in the woods, where no cliché of a dysfunctional urban detective could ever find it.  Who knows, maybe it will come to that.

I veer off the track and clamber up onto the bank to take a closer look at the tree trunks gnawed by starving deer during this year’s unusually harsh winter.  I investigate fallen fir trees and the dens their roots make.  One looks just like a forest demon.  It’s only because I am an adult, and this is not a Hollywood fantasy, that it doesn’t blink into life and say something startling to me.

The almost-sighting of a forest demon, even a potentially malevolent one, is a good sign.  Any spark of imagination is always a good sign.

A mile or so further on, and I’ve managed to completely shift my head away from the broken-record ruminations of work.  I drift off into ideas for our blog.  I begin to daydream the glittering heights of internet-business success.

In a small childish corner of my mind, other daydreams continue:  make-believe stories of talking forest demons and palatial dens in the woods.  I don’t know yet if these stories are benign or evil, but they simmer away below my grown-up façade.

By the time I get back to the car, there is no longer any need to commit an act of murder, or to hide any unlucky corpse in the forestry plantation.  I’m home clear for the day.  Bring on the next working day.  Bring on another blog post.