Did the earth move......?

Birds are looking at me.

Nasty, beady-eyed little things. As I sit at my desk and look out of my window, several starlings land on the roof of a house opposite, and jointly engage in a paranoia-inducing staring session. More join them, and I look away uneasily in the hope that they will lose interest, but it seems that my neighbour's roof is the perch du jour, and yet more join their chums; so many in fact, that the original perchees are obliged to shuffle along so there is room for the new arrivals. And they all turn and gawp at me.

I am put in mind of the Alfred Hitchcock film "The Birds".

Why are they behaving so? All the houses look the same - why all sit on one, and gaze beadily at mine? Perplexed, I turn away and pretend to be Doing Something, but sneak a look out of the corner of my eye every so often. They are still looking. Then all of a sudden, the starlings have vanished, gone, disappeared. Nary a one is left on the roof, and I turn back to the computer, inexplicably relieved.

And become aware that the floor beneath my feet (well, where ELSE would it be?) is moving...... Startled, I realise that it is NOT an earthquake, presaged as it may have been by the strange behaviour of the birds, but merely that one of my domestic appliances is running amok in the kitchen. A hideous clattering heralds the imminent demise of my washing machine, and before I can hurtle down the stairs at breakneck speed, there is a loud bang and the machine continues on the spin cycle with the drum thrashing about inside the housing......

Bugger. No sooner is one domestic crisis over than another appears to take its place. I manage to extricate the shreds of clothes from the now defunct machine, and discover that the dying throes have shaken loose all sorts of yukkiness and coated the wet laundry with a foul-smelling residue, so not only do I have to rewash the lot, but I have to do it by hand! Someone up there is punishing me.........