The Weather Forecast

There’s a pile of broken red bricks in one corner of the garden. Beyond the orchard there’s a small hill covered in wild flowers and long grass, with an apple tree on the hillside. The two walls meet at the top of the hill, and in the corner there’s a pile of red bricks. Some of them are broken. I’ve always wondered how they got there.

My uncle Ben once went to America with the intention of going to the pub down the road. Or maybe it was the other way around. He once sang ‘Tiptoe Through the Tulips’ at a party, and when he had finished the song he had a feeling that he’d sung something about a glow worm. He told himself that it was just his imagination, and he forgot about it. When he got home that night he turned on the TV to see the weather forecast because he was planning on walking the five miles to his brother’s house on the following day. But he’d had a lot to drink in the pub and he wasn’t paying attention to what the weatherman was saying. He whistled ‘Tiptoe Through the Tulips’ as he sat in front of the TV, and he only realised that he wasn’t paying attention when the weather forecast was finished. He tried to remember what the weather man said, and he was sure he had heard the word ‘blizzard’, but this was in July. He thought that he must have imagined it again, like the glow worm in the song. This particular weather man often used to get the weather wrong when he began his career. He started going to the cinema and taking notes of the weather in the films. He’d base his weather forecast on these notes rather than any meteorological data, and he was more successful with this method. He became very popular when he started including other details from the films. Sometimes he’d go through the whole plot in his weather forecast. When Ben woke up on the following day there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. He had his breakfast and set off for his brother’s house. It was a beautiful walk down quiet country roads, up and down hills, walking in and out of the shadows of trees. But then he saw a piece of broken glass at the side of the road and he suddenly remembered a few more details from the weather forecast on the previous night. He remembered the weather man saying something about a man on his deathbed, a snow dome dropping from his hand and shattering on the floor. Ben felt a sudden sense of foreboding. He stopped and looked at the sky. There was nothing above but blue, and he told himself that he just imagined those details about the snow dome, the deathbed and the blizzard. He walked on, and to ease his nerves he started singing ‘Tiptoe Through the Tulips’ to himself. But fifty yards down the road he stopped again when he realised that he had just sung the line ‘with a glow worm’. The sense of foreboding was stronger than ever, and he wondered if he should go on. He looked at the sky. There still wasn’t a cloud to be seen, and he told himself that they often get it wrong on the weather forecast. He walked on again, and when he got to the top of the next hill, he saw a boy standing on another hill a few hundred yards away. The boy was holding a sled (he had seen the weather forecast too and he was expecting a blizzard). When Ben saw the sled he turned around and ran all the way home. Or nearly all the way home – he didn’t quite make it to his house. He got as far as a pub. Most of his journeys end there.

The moose’s head over the fireplace looks so sad today, almost as if he’s thinking of a life in America he missed out on. The eyes are full of regret. That sort of regret has started countless lives in the pub.

German Football

In one corner of the garden, in amongst the trees, there’s a row of three small sheds with stone walls and iron roofs. There are a few holes in the roofs now. I went into the sheds after the rain cleared in the evening and the metal buckets beneath the holes were full of rain water.

My cousin Ted once pretended to be a German footballer. He didn’t realise what he was doing, but that was it – pretending to be a German footballer. He only noticed it when he wrote his memoirs and called them ‘Eine Kleine Hospital Passe’. The book was about his years in German football, but he’d never even been to Germany. He married a woman called Anne who used to do odd things after a few drinks, like stealing traffic cones or writing letters to the International Olympic Committee asking them to make her field an Olympic sport. After they moved into their new house, Ted bought a desk for the study, but he was never good at assembling these things. He read the first line of the instructions: “Once upon a time there was sugar on the table and the sun was shining…” He spent an hour standing there with the instruction manual in his hands, trying to figure out the meaning of the line. When Anne came into the room and saw that he still hadn’t started putting the desk together, the excuse he came up with was that he had been reading the German instructions. Anne said, “Remember Ted, you don’t speak German. You’re not a German footballer.” She left him to put the desk together, but he still couldn’t get past the first line, so he decided to look at the German instructions. At least he was able to get past the first line, even though he couldn’t understand them. He assembled the desk anyway. Later that afternoon they had some unexpected visitors. A delegation from the International Olympic Committee called to inspect the field. One member of the delegation recognised Ted straight away. He shook my cousin’s hand and said that he had read his autobiography, and that Ted’s profile would be a huge boost in their bid to make the field an Olympic sport. Ted tried to keep up the pretence of being a German footballer. He answered all questions with ‘Ja’ or ‘Nein’. They went out into the field and the delegation seemed very impressed with it. They asked about the building schedule and Anne said, “To build what?” “I don’t know really… But usually in situations like this when we come to visit a field, it normally means that something is going to be built there.” “Oh… I suppose we could come up with a schedule for building one of those.” “Splendid.” They asked Ted what he thought, and he felt he should try to say something other than ‘Ja’ or ‘Nein’, so he said the first line of German that came into his head. A German member of the delegation translated it for everyone else. “He said something about inserting the B screws into the holes on the surface.” “Oh yeah,” Anne said. “He’s talking about building a desk. Maybe that’s what we should build in the field.” The delegation were enthusiastic about this idea, and they were delighted when they heard that Ted and Anne had experience in building a desk. They went inside to inspect it. They were very impressed with the desk, until Ted put a book on it and one side of it collapsed. But even then they were enthusiastic about the proposal, and it would have been successful if the delegation hadn’t been bribed to make a field in another country an Olympic sport instead. Ted and Anne weren’t disappointed. Ted would have found it difficult to keep up the pretence of being a German footballer during the Olympics, and Anne didn’t like the idea of all those visitors in their new home when they hadn’t even finished the painting.

The moose’s head over the fireplace seemed to make a sound when I moved a piece on the chess board, almost as if it was clicking its tongue, so I moved the piece back and made another move, but I heard that sound again. So I kept making a move until I didn’t hear any sound. I was playing against my wife, Iris. She made her next move when she came in an hour later. The moose knows nothing about chess.

Smoking

I stood in the glasshouse and looked out at the trees, the branches moving in a gentle breeze. The shadows slowly crept across the lawn as the sun went down.

My cousin Jane lived next to a man who said he could make people give up smoking through hypnosis. All of his neighbours went to him, even the ones who didn’t smoke. Jane went to him too and he said to her, “Don’t think of anything but red paint… red paint…” She was suspicious of this because on the previous week a friend of hers went to him and he told her not to think of anything but building a dog kennel. To help her focus on this he got her to build a kennel for his dog. But Jane agreed to paint his fence because the paint was blue – she was confused rather than suspicious. She spent over an hour working on the fence, and then she looked up and saw the white trail of a jet across the blue sky. She looked back at the blue fence posts. There was one white plank left to paint, and the confusion faded when she saw this. The colour seemed to make more sense. When she finished painting it she looked up at the sky as the white trail disappeared. She went home and sat under the tree, looking up at the sky as the stars began to come out. As darkness enveloped the blue above, the confusion grew in her mind again. She stared up at the stars until she saw the red light of an airplane move across the sky, and the confusion slowly disappeared. She went inside to get an apple. In her mind she saw a basket full of red apples, but when she looked at the basket in the kitchen, all of the apples were green. This confused her more than ever. She took one of the apples and went to the window. When she looked out she saw the red glow of a cigarette in the darkness, and her mind began to clear once more. The confusion vanished when she remembered that she never smoked anyway. She had never smoked a cigarette in her life. She looked out the window and ate her apple with complete peace of mind. Until a desire for a cigarette started to grow.

The moose’s head over the fireplace stared blankly ahead when I walked into the room, but as I looked towards the window I thought I saw it blinking. I talked about the roses and the orchard, but it just stared blankly ahead again. I looked out the window in silence, or near silence. I could hear the sound of the clock in the hall.

Dad's Army

I walked through the fields behind the garden and stood in the long grass on a hill, a cool breeze on my face, the sun still an hour away from the horizon. I could see the sunlight shining on a car miles away.

My uncle Alan once said he was Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army and I believed him, even after I found out that he’s just a fictional character – Corporal Jones, not my uncle. (Dad’s Army is a famous British sitcom - more info). My uncle seemed as real as the short people he used to make fun of, and I wondered why I thought Corporal Jones was just as real. I was young at the time, and when I got older I figured out the truth, but I should have spotted it years earlier. I always knew that Dad’s Army was just a sitcom. I suppose I never really thought about it. His daughter, my cousin Chloe, was a bit of a looker, so she had no trouble attracting men, but there was one drawback to going out with her. All of her new boyfriends had to gain the approval of Chloe’s mother, my aunt Sarah. The latest boyfriend would be invited around for tea to meet Sarah. I can remember one called Victor who wasn’t too worried about this meeting until he met Chloe’s previous boyfriend one day, and Victor happened to mention the visit to Chloe’s house to have tea with her mother. A look of fear came into the eyes of the ex, and he said, “She’ll ask you about your soul!” The more Victor thought about this, the more afraid he became. He had three days until the meeting with Chloe’s mother and he spent all of that time trying to think of things he could say about his soul, but he couldn’t come up with anything. He was terrified when he met my aunt and uncle in the hall. Alan went upstairs after shaking hands with Victor, and the others went into the sitting room. Sarah poured the tea, and she was just about to say something to Victor when he started talking, just in case she said something about his soul. He talked about the first thing that came into his head, which was trees. It was the only thing that came into his head. The pressure of the situation got to him and he could only talk about trees. Sometimes he ran out of things to say about trees, but he always kept talking when it looked as if Sarah was about to say something – he’d just repeat something he’d said earlier. He finally stopped talking after an hour, and my aunt didn’t have any desire to speak either. She thought he was a complete idiot, and naturally she disapproved of him as a boyfriend for her daughter. Chloe split up with Victor because she valued the approval of her mother, and he did seem like a bit of an idiot after spending an hour telling them everything he knew about trees, which he could have done in thirty seconds. The next boyfriend, Alex, seemed much more promising, but then he met Victor a few days before the meeting with Sarah, and when Alex mentioned the invitation to tea with the parents, Victor grabbed hold of his shirt and said, with a look of terror on his face, “She’ll ask you about your soul!” Alex spent an hour talking about Eskimos when he met Chloe’s mother, and Sarah classified him as an idiot too. She was getting a bit sick of this – having to waste so much time listening to idiots babbling on about stupid things. She’d lost count of the amount of times it had happened. They’d talk about things like trees, Eskimos, shoes, bees, Santa Claus, carpets or ice bergs. Sarah couldn’t face another hour of this, so when Chloe’s latest boyfriend, Bill, was invited around for tea, my aunt came up with a way of determining whether or not he was an idiot before they ever had to listen to his lecture on trees or Eskimos or whatever. She asked Alan to introduce himself as Corporal Jones from Dad’s Army. If Bill didn’t believe it, they’d take him inside for tea and let him talk. If he did believe it – and given Chloe’s habit of bringing home idiots, he almost certainly would – then Sarah would suddenly remember some appointment she had or a friend she was supposed to meet, and she’d have to cancel the tea with Bill. So when Chloe arrived with Bill, she introduced him to her parents in the hall, and her father said, “I’m Corporal Jones. Y’ know, Dad’s Army. They don’t like it up ’em.” They shook hands, and a few seconds of silence followed as they waited for Bill’s reaction. His lack of reaction seemed to suggest that he believed the ‘Corporal Jones’ story. Bill started to panic – he had a feeling that the silence would be broken at any moment by a question about his soul, so he started talking about the first thing that came into his head – sawdust. Sarah didn’t know what to make of this. Why would he start talking about sawdust? Was he making some comment on her husband’s claim to be Corporal Jones? She decided to give him the benefit of the doubt, so she brought him inside for tea. An hour later he wandered onto the subject of sawdust on butchers’ floors. Then he suddenly remembered that Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army was a butcher, and he had a vague memory of Chloe’s father introducing himself as Corporal Jones. Bill thought that if he is a butcher, then he’d surely have spotted his lack of knowledge about butchers. But then he might not be Corporal Jones at all. He looks a bit more like Captain Mainwaring than Corporal Jones. Captain Mainwaring worked in a bank. Bill couldn’t remember anything about Chloe’s father working in a bank. He asked my uncle what he does for a living, and Alan said, “I’m an architect.” Bill couldn’t remember which one in Dad’s Army was an architect. Alan noticed that Bill looked confused, so he said, “Is something wrong?” “This is very embarrassing,” Bill said. “I’m afraid I’ve completely forgotten your name.” Sarah and Alan laughed and looked at each other. He’s not an idiot – that’s what they said in their expressions. “I’m Alan,” he said as he shook Bill’s hand again. Bill tried to picture which one in Dad’s Army was Alan the architect, and he had a vague idea who it was. He’s married to Chloe now.

The moose’s head over the fireplace seemed to be chewing something when I walked into the room and I thought of the words ‘what’s the matter, Jones?’. I looked out the window as the sun reached the horizon. I listened to the sound of a jet fly overhead, and looked at the white trail across the sky until it faded away. I thought I heard a chewing sound and I very nearly said, “Come here, Jones.”