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Tim Dowling: have I killed the tortoise, or is it just angry?

It’s a curious side-effect of lockdown living: my survival instinct is beginning to desert me. It’s not an intentional recklessness; it’s more as if I’ve lost my sense of smell, but for danger instead of curdled milk.

I first noticed it a few weeks back, while nailing some bunting to the front of the house at my wife’s direction. I got to the top rung of the ladder – hammer in one hand, the end of the bunting clamped between my teeth – and looked down.

“Huh,” I said.

“What now?” my wife said.

“I’m wearing flip-flops,” I said.

“That’s not like you,” she said. “Should you put on shoes?”

I tried to think about what might happen if I didn’t. Normally my capacity for anticipating unwanted outcomes is boundless. This time: nothing.

“Nah,” I said. “I’m up here already.”

It could be that the vigilance social distancing requires has exhausted my caution. I wash my hands for 20 minutes after coming back from the shops, then cut myself trying to chop an onion while looking at my phone.

On Saturday, our neighbours email, asking to borrow my electric hedge trimmer. When I later hear it being used to cut the tall hedge that separates our front gardens, I feel shamed into doing my side.

As soon as the hedge trimmer is returned, I change into appropriate footwear, more for appearances than anything else, and plug the machine into an outlet just inside the front door.

The trimmer has a safety feature that makes it impossible to cut one-handed. Far from being grateful for this, I am soon imagining ways to bypass it. I try to level off the top of the hedge by holding the trimmer upside down, high above my head. Eventually I stop doing this, not because it’s patently unsafe, but because my arms are tired. I drag the ladder outside and continue.

Once I’ve flattened the top, I run the blades along the vertical surface of the hedge, creating a neat block of greenery. I’m reaching backwards with a final flourish to catch a stray protruding leaf when I hear a sharp pop. Light flashes in front of my face.

My wife comes downstairs to find me standing in the doorway, staring at the hedge trimmer’s neatly severed cord.

“The radio suddenly went off,” she says.

“Yeah,” I say. “I imagine all the electricity is off.” She comes outside to see what I’ve done.

“You’re going to fucking kill yourself,” she says.

“This is the front garden,” I say. “That’s back garden language.”

“You’re usually such a health and safety freak,” she says.

“That was the old me,” I say.

Related: Tim Dowling: Am I being gaslit by my own garden?

A week later, I am trying to fix some wooden trim to the edge of a round garden table, gluing and screwing as I go. Because the trim is being bent under pressure like a barrel stave, the whole operation has to be conducted with a swiftness that suits my present inability to foresee consequences. I have no time to think about what could possibly go wrong.

I am holding the trim with my knees while screwing it into place when I feel something nudge my foot. I look down to see a puddle of glue forming on the ground, and the tortoise lapping at it.

“What are you doing!” I scream. For the first time in weeks, I feel the return of panic.

“What’s going on?” the oldest says when I come running into the kitchen with a tortoise in one hand and a rag in the other.

“I’ve killed the tortoise,” I say. “Don’t tell Mum.”

The tortoise has a certain emotional range – he can do forbearance, resignation, regret. This is the first time I’ve seen fury. He doesn’t like being upside down in the sink, and he doesn’t want the glue wiped off his chin. He likes the glue.

“Don’t bite!” I shout. “And don’t put your head in!”

Five days later the tortoise is fine, but he hasn’t forgotten, and neither have I.