Choral Music.

Our dog loves all the leaves on the ground. He can spend hours running around in circles in the trees at the back of the garden. I could easily spend an hour just standing beneath the trees. There’s much more light in there with the leaves beneath your feet instead of above your head.

My cousin Chloe decided to organise a party when her parents, Aunt Sarah and Uncle Alan, went to a wedding and stayed overnight. The wedding was on a Friday. Sarah said they’d be back at noon on Saturday, but Chloe and her younger brother, Gary, thought they’d have enough time to clean up whatever needed to be cleaned, or glue together whatever needed reassembling. They both got a bit carried away with the preparations. They hired a chef to cook the food, and then just before the start of the party, a choir turned up on the doorstep. Chloe and her brother blamed each other for hiring the choir, although it did ring a bell in Chloe’s mind. She had ordered so many things for the party that she couldn’t keep track of them all. There were over thirty singers plus the choirmaster. There was a big room at one side of the house, so they were able to fit them all in. The choral music went down surprisingly well. It wasn’t something you could dance to, although a few did try. It was just like any other party in the amount of alcohol consumed, and that was the main thing. Chloe had a bit of a headache when she woke up on the following morning, and as she walked down the stairs she was afraid that a much bigger headache was ahead of her, but she was pleasantly surprised to find so few signs of the party the night before. There were a lot of empty bottles and a few people sleeping on the floor, but bottles and people are easy enough to clear up. People will clear themselves up if you poke them with a bottle or your foot (something Chloe discovered by experiment). There was one cloud on the horizon, or one stain on the carpet, to be more precise. The silver lining was that it was just water after a vase had been knocked over, but it was still noticeable. Chloe wondered how she’d clean it up. As she thought about this, she remembered a kids’ TV show called ‘Leaknot the Teapot’. It was about a teapot called Leaknot who was always leaking, but he always tried to pretend that he wasn’t. One week he was sitting on a coffee table and he spilled tea on the carpet. The stain was noticeable then too, but he got his friend the dog to lie on it. The dog covered the stain and his body heat dried the tea in the carpet. Chloe remembered this and looked around the room. They didn’t have a dog, but there was someone asleep on the floor near the piano. She woke him up and said, “Sorry to bother you, but would you mind lying down over there instead of here?” The man stood up and said, “No problem at all.” He didn’t seem to notice the stain on the carpet as he lay down on it. Chloe knew she couldn’t use him to cover the stain from her parents, like the dog did, but at least he’d soak up the water and dry the carpet. She was delighted with herself for solving that little problem, but then she noticed an unusual noise around her, and a lot of unusual activity. The house was full of choristers, and they all sounded distressed. They were calling out the name of their choirmaster, Mr. Williams. They’d obviously become separated from their master, and they were looking all over the house for him, even in places where he couldn’t possibly be. They were lifting rugs, or looking in cupboards and shouting out his name. One of them was looking up the chimney. Chloe tried talking to them, but they didn’t take any notice of her. Gary came downstairs to see what all the noise was about and his sister told him what was happening. She said, “I think this is like when goslings get separated from their mother. Or is it with ducks? They don’t know what to do without their mother, or choirmaster. What we need is someone to pretend to be their master to lead them out of the house. We’ve got to get rid of them.” Gary guessed from the tone of his sister’s voice that the ‘someone’ she had in mind was her brother. She wanted him to dress up as Mr. Williams and lead the choristers away from the house. If they were like goslings or ducklings, they’d follow their mother. He refused to do it at first, but she pointed out that they only had an hour until their parents came back. My aunt Sarah said they’d be back at noon, and she was always on time. Gary asked Chloe where he’d lead them to and she said, “Just take them to the park and set them free.” Gary asked how he’d set them free and she answered that with one word: Run. Gary thought that it sounded cruel but Chloe convinced him that they’d surely find their way to their rightful homes in the end. Mr. Williams had a beard and glasses, and he wore a black suit. Chloe had a friend who was costume designer in a theatre, so she sent Gary off to see her, and he returned at five to twelve wearing a wig, a fake beard, glasses and a black suit. Even Chloe didn’t recognise him at first when she opened the door, but then she remembered why he was there and she said in a very loud voice, “Hello, Mr. Williams.” The choristers all rushed into the hall and stared in silence at Gary. They seemed a bit unsure about something, and Gary was about to say, “I’m Mr. Williams,” but then their neighbour, Mr. Harris, walked up the garden path, tapped Gary on the shoulder and said, “Are you the leader of this choir?” For a second, Gary thought this was an extraordinary stroke of luck; it was the perfect way to confirm his identity. But there was something about Mr. Harris’s tone of voice and the look on his face that suggested he was hoping to inflict some sort of an injury on Mr. Williams. Gary couldn’t deny being Mr. Williams in front of the choristers, and they were all waiting for his answer, so he said he was. Mr. Harris said, “It was you who went on a bit of a rampage in my garden last night, wasn’t it?” Gary denied this completely but Mr. Harris said he saw a man with a beard and glasses, wearing a black suit, directing the choristers to dig up a small tree and plant it on top of his car. Gary insisted that it wasn’t him and Mr. Harris said, “How many choirmasters with beards, glasses and black suits are there around the place?” Gary said that there could very well be another one somewhere, and this led to a discussion on the statistical likelihood of this eventuality. Mr. Harris would give a reason why it was almost impossible and Gary would come up with a reason why it could happen any day. Chloe kept looking at her watch. It was nearly twelve and there was no sign of this conversation coming to an end. She tried to think of what she could do, but she was panicking, and all she could think of is what Leaknot the Teapot would do in this situation. She remembered an episode in which Leaknot was trying to get to the sink because there was a tiny leak in his side, but on the way he met Laura, the daughter of Leaknot’s owner. She said, “Leaknot, do you know what an elk hammer is?” He was desperate to get rid of her so he said, “It’s a hammer for elks.” This didn’t get rid of her. She thought about it for a while and said, “Why would you need a hammer for elks?” He said, “Why would you need a hammer for anything?” This didn’t get rid of her either. She started listing out all the things you’d need a hammer for, and Leaknot was starting to panic then too. When she said that you might use a hammer for breaking open piggy banks, Leaknot said, “Your brother broke your piggy bank with a hammer.” She rushed off to find her brother then, and Leaknot made his way to the sink. This is the only thing Chloe could think of. She said, “And he broke your… glasshouse with a hammer.” Mr. Harris didn’t have a glasshouse but it was enough of an excuse to grab Gary by the lapels and lift him up. The choir in the hall didn’t like the threatening look of this action against their master. They moved towards Mr. Harris, and he didn’t like the threatening noises they were making. He let go of Gary and moved away down the garden path, but the choir followed him. When he ran away, they ran after him. Aunt Sarah and Uncle Alan came back to see their neighbour being chased down the street by the choir. When they asked what was going on, Chloe said, “Mr. Harris had a party last night,” and raised her eyes to heaven, clicking her tongue. At that moment, the real Mr. Williams emerged from a bush in Mr. Harris’s garden and he did something that Leaknot the Teapot always did his best to avoid doing.

The moose’s head over the fireplace looks a bit nervous. When Iris, the wife, came into the room yesterday, she had a straw hat in her hand, and I think that’s the source of the nerves. He has a fear of hats. A nephew of mine once put a hunting hat on the moose’s head, took a Polaroid of it and then stuck the photo to the wall opposite the fireplace. Whenever he sees a hat he’s afraid that someone will put it on his head.

Rabbits.

It’s been much colder recently, but we’ve had very little rain, thankfully. The garden still looks great on a freezing morning, the bare trees against the blue sky above, frost on the grass.

My cousin June bought a rabbit for her son, Graham, as a birthday present. Graham’s sister, Daisy, had already got a rabbit for Christmas, but June always thought it looked lonely on its own, so she got another one for Graham. She built a hutch in the back garden. June was no expert when it came to building rabbit hutches, but she didn’t think that rabbit hutch building was an area where expertise was absolutely essential. As long as the rabbits were happy in it and they couldn’t escape, it would be perfectly adequate. However, June’s construction failed on both of these criteria. It failed the first because they tried to escape from it, and it failed the second because they succeeded. But June wasn’t disappointed. She loved the idea of the rabbits escaping from what was effectively a prison. It must have been hugely exciting for them, so when she rebuilt the hutch, she allowed the possibility of escape, and the rabbits managed to get out again. The next hutch had little wooden fence posts all around it, but one of the fence posts would give way at the slightest pressure, and the rabbits found it. June had discovered a new hobby here. She was building a new hutch almost every day, and constantly coming up with new ideas to allow their escape. She even added in little details like a ‘no escaping’ sign. The rabbits were getting better at the escaping all the time, but they were in no real danger. The house was near a railway line, and there was a fence all around the back garden to keep the kids away from the trains. About a hundred yards down the road, there was an old train station. Very few trains were using that line, and the station was deserted for most of the day. A lot of small train stations around the country were being closed down, and the Minister for Transport was due to visit this one. The station manager was afraid that the Minister would close it down too, but he had an idea to save the place. He created a lawn on the platform. When people asked him why he did this, he’d say, “They’ll never shut us down if we have a lawn on the platform.” No one was able to point out any flaw in this theory, and he was convinced it would work. When June went out to feed the rabbits one morning, they weren’t in the hutch, which was no surprise at all, but she couldn’t find them anywhere in the garden either. At first she didn’t seriously consider the possibility that they had escaped from the garden, but then the thought dawned on her that after all the practise they had at escaping, they must have figured out a way of getting to the other side of the fence too. She went straight to the railway line to make sure they weren’t there, but Daisy and Graham went to the train station. In their minds they always believed that rabbits and lawns go together, and they could picture the two rabbits playing on the platform. June used to clean all the brass in the house with a polish called ‘Billy Brass’. The kids would notice the shiny door handles and they’d ask their mother what happened to them. She’d say, “Billy Brass cleaned them.” They assumed that Billy Brass was a man who lived down the road, and they also came to believe that Lenny Bull (a neighbour of their uncle) cleaned bulls, although they did wonder why he was always so clean and alive. When they got to the train station to look for the rabbits, the Minister for Transport was just arriving to inspect the place. The station manager shook the Minister’s hand and said, “Welcome, Mr. Rabbitte.” Daisy and Graham were convinced that this man had something to do with the disappearance of their rabbits, but when they asked him about it he denied it completely. Of course, they didn’t believe his denial and they kept asking him about it. They followed him all around the station, saying things like, “Are you sure you haven’t seen two rabbits? Or maybe you’ve been cleaning two rabbits?” The Minister seemed to be getting annoyed at this constant pestering, but the kids didn’t give up. When they stood on the platform, Daisy said to him, “Are you sure you haven’t been cleaning two rabbits?” The Minister said, “For the last time, I have nothing to do with rabbits. I’m here about the train station. I run the trains. I effectively own the trains. I’m responsible for the operation of our rail system and for everyone on the trains. I have nothing whatsoever to do with rabbits.” Just as he said that, a train came to a halt in the station and the two rabbits stepped out onto the platform. Daisy and Graham turned towards the Minister. They shook their heads and clicked their tongues at him. The Minister was deeply embarrassed. He apologised to the kids but they wouldn’t listen to him. They played with the rabbits on the grass, and the press photographers took photos of them. The Minister imagined those photos on the front pages of the papers, along with a story of how he… He wasn’t sure what he had done, but it would inevitably be portrayed negatively if he had made kids who were playing with rabbits in the grass unhappy about something. And he’d only make things much worse if he closed down a place where kids play with rabbits in the grass, so he announced that he certainly wouldn’t be closing down this train station and he left as quickly as he could. June was delighted to have the rabbits back. At this stage she was an expert in building rabbit hutches, and she made sure they wouldn’t be able to escape from this latest one, but they never even tried. They were happy in it, and they didn’t even try to go beyond the fence when they played in the garden. June never found out where they got to on the train, but they’d obviously seen the world and satisfied their curiosity about what’s beyond the fence.

The moose’s head over the fireplace looks very serious, and I get the impression that he’s deliberately trying to look serious. When I was walking by the window the other day I looked in and I thought I saw him laughing, but every time I go into the room he looks very serious, which would lead me to think that he’s been laughing at me behind my back and he deliberately tries to look serious when I’m around so he won’t laugh in front of me. I did accidentally glue my head to an accordion the other day, but that wasn’t funny at all.

Snooker Puppy.

I cut the grass at the weekend. It was nearly a month since I last cut it, and the next cut is probably a few months away. Within hours the lawns were covered in leaves again, and everywhere you walk you can hear the sound of leaves beneath your feet.

My cousin Hector once bought his daughters, Alice and Grace, a snooker table for Christmas. They had no real interest in snooker, and they wondered if he’d really bought it for himself, but they were willing to have a go at it anyway. Grace read through the rule book first and then she handed it over to her sister. When Alice was reading it she noticed a line that had been written in with a pencil. It said ‘Your opponent is allowed to place an object on the table before you take your shot’. Alice suspected that Grace had added this line, but she didn’t say anything about it because it seemed to make the game sound more exciting. When they finally started playing, just as Alice was about to take her first shot, Grace put a book on the table in front of the pocket her sister was aiming for. Alice took the shot anyway. The ball hit off the book and bounced back towards her, but she was happy that she’d managed to hit the book. Then it was Grace’s turn. She was left with an easy pott to the centre pocket, but just as she was about to strike the cue ball, her sister put the puppy on the table. He went straight to Grace and started licking her face, and every time she tried to bend over to take the shot he licked her face, so she just struck the cue ball while standing up straight. She missed the pott by a few inches. The puppy had never seen snooker before and he didn’t know what to make of all the different coloured balls rolling around the table, but whatever it was, he liked it. He chased the balls, knocking them everywhere, so Grace’s shot went on for over five minutes before all the balls came to rest, and in that time, three of them had dropped into the pockets. Alice and Grace liked it too. They felt as if they’d discovered a new sport. They left the puppy on the table for the rest of their game and it went on for hours. They even tried to train him not to push the cue ball into the pocket. Hector was happy that the girls liked their present so much. When he went to the pub on the day after Christmas, he told his friends about the snooker table and the new sport his daughters had invented. By the time he got home, everyone had gone to bed . The house was in darkness, and he couldn’t hear a sound. He listened very carefully for any noise from the puppy because of its habit of clinging to his leg, but he thought the little chap was probably sound asleep in the kitchen, off chasing birds in dreamland, which is exactly where Hector was heading. Before going to bed, he couldn’t resist having a quick game of snooker, so he tiptoed through the kitchen and went to the room where the snooker table was. He turned on the light and picked up a cue, but within a second of striking the cue ball he felt something clinging to his leg. He looked down and saw the puppy looking back up at him. Its basket was under the table, so it must have been sleeping there. Hector tried to remove it but his eye to hand coordination wasn’t at its best and he failed. What he really needed right then was sleep, so he climbed the stairs with the puppy still stuck to his leg. Just before he went to bed he remembered an idea he had in the pub earlier when they were talking about new sports, so he wrote the idea on a piece of paper in case he forgot it. Then he lay down in bed and went to sleep, and so did the puppy. When Hector woke in the morning, he looked down and saw the puppy still asleep on his leg. He tried to extract his leg as carefully as he could but the puppy woke up, and as soon as he realised where he was and what he had been doing before he fell asleep, he started doing it again. He clung to Hector’s leg and wouldn’t let go. Hector remembered the note he’d written on the night before. He’d left it on his bedside locker and he looked at it then. It just said ‘Teach Gollyball’. He knew it was a sport of some sort, but he had trouble making sense of it. Presumably the object of the sport was to teach someone how to play Gollyball, but he didn’t know what Gollyball was. He’d have to find out what it was before he could teach it, and he wondered how he’d find someone who could teach him how to play the game. He spent hours that day just pacing back and forth with the puppy stuck to his leg, trying to come up with a solution to this problem. The girls wanted to play snooker with the puppy, and they were delighted when their father finally went to the pub. He told his friends there about Teach Gollyball and the problem he was having with it, and they all made fun of him. They said it was a stupid idea, and that it was even more stupid to waste time thinking about it, but Hector wouldn’t give up. He knew it made sense when he first thought of it. He spent most of the next day pacing the room with the puppy attached his leg again, but he still couldn’t figure out how he’d go about playing Teach Gollyball. The girls tried removing the puppy so they could play snooker, but the puppy always preferred to stay on the leg. They knew they had to get their father out of the house, so Alice said to him, “Teach Gollyball is obviously a sport where you teach Gollyball by just letting people learn it for themselves.” That made sense to Hector, but then he said, “How would I learn how to play Gollyball myself?” Alice didn’t know how to answer that one, but her sister came to the rescue. “You’d just watch people learning how to play it,” Grace said. This made perfect sense to Hector. He couldn’t wait to get to the pub to tell his friends, but as he was going out the door he thought of something else. He said to the girls, “What sort of sport is Gollyball?” Alice said, “It’s obviously a type of snooker. You got the idea from our version of snooker.” This made perfect sense to Hector too, and ten minutes later he was sitting in the pub, about to explain it all to his friends, but as he tried to form the words he found it difficult to shape them into sense. “It’s a type of snooker,” he said. “But it’s difficult to explain in words. You really have to see it.” But then one of his friends said, “You could show us on the snooker table at your house.” Hector agreed and he hoped he’d be able to come up with an idea on the walk back to the house. The girls’ game of snooker didn’t last long. They put the puppy on the table, but he was tired after all the clinging and he fell asleep straightaway. They couldn’t get him off the table, so they put a cardboard box over him and played around the box, but it was no fun without the puppy, so they abandoned the game. When Hector arrived in the room with his friends he still hadn’t thought of anything. The puppy woke up as soon as he heard my cousin’s voice, but he couldn’t find a way out of the box. Hector and his friends just saw a box moving all around the table, knocking the remaining balls everywhere. Alice had left a cue on the table. It was pointing towards a corner pocket, and it guided the balls into that pocket. The black ball was left hanging over the centre pocket, but the puppy knocked it in when he finally got out from under the box, leaving just the cue ball on the table. As his friends stared at the puppy in astonishment, Hector said, “Now that’s Gollyball. Because… it makes you say ‘golly’. And I taught the puppy how to do that.” The puppy jumped off the table and clung to my cousin’s leg, but he just patted its head and said, “Good dog.” The puppy looked confused.

The moose’s head over the fireplace seems to be back to his old self now. He was angry about something for a few days. I don’t know what it was that started it. I remember noticing that he looked angry when my wife’s aunt came to visit a few days ago. Actually, it might have been that visit that made him angry. It certainly made me angry. I pointed out the moose’s look of anger to the aunt and she started laughing. Through her laughter she was just about able to say, “He looks like Al Capone.” That made the moose much more angry. He really did start to look like Al Capone then. I don’t really know what Al Capone looked like, but I’d imagine he’d have looked fairly angry.

The Crossbow Orchard.

The trees are almost bare now after the storm last week. There are rust-coloured leaves all over the lawns. Thankfully we haven’t had much rain over the past few days. We’ve had a lot of grey skies instead, but you don’t really need the blue above when you’ve got thousands of leaves below to look at.

My cousin Ronan had been going out with a woman called Heather for a few months when they met another cousin of mine, Jane. She asked Heather what she saw in Ronan, and Heather said it was his romantic charm that she couldn’t resist. Jane laughed when she heard that, but Ronan told the story of how he invited Heather to a party at his parents’ house, and in the light of the moon he serenaded her in the crossbow orchard. Jane didn’t laugh at that. She was very impressed, but the same couldn’t be said for Heather. She had never heard that place referred to as ‘the crossbow orchard’ before. The night when he serenaded her was a beautiful memory, but the idea that it took place in an orchard called after a crossbow seemed to drain all the romance from the occasion. Ronan sensed this. She seemed much colder towards him, a lot like the way she was before he serenaded her in the orchard. When she asked him why the place was called ‘the crossbow orchard’ he figured out what was on her mind. He knew he needed to find a way of injecting the romance back into the memory, so he told her that his father had proposed to his mother in that very orchard, but as he was about to put the ring on her finger, a magpie flew away with it. The bird didn’t get far. Ronan’s father, my uncle Harry, got out his crossbow and shot it. He retrieved the ring and put it on the finger of his wife-to-be, Aunt Bridget, but that’s just according to Ronan’s version of events. The real story had nothing to do with proposals of marriage. The truth behind the name is that a few years earlier, Ronan’s father had got home from the pub late one night and he thought he heard something moving in the orchard at the end of the garden, so he went outside with his crossbow. Earlier that day, Aunt Bridget had bought a peacock from a friend of hers who lived down the road. The friend thought it would be a good idea to have a peacock roaming about their front lawn, but her dog didn’t agree, so she sold the peacock to Bridget. Uncle Harry wasn’t aware of this at all, so when the peacock spread its feathers, he didn’t know what it was at first and he shot at it. He missed, even though it was a big target. Fortunately for the peacock, the alcohol in Harry’s brain impaired his ability to shoot peacocks with crossbows. The arrow came to a rest in a tree, where it remains to this day. That’s why the place became known as the crossbow orchard. Uncle Harry has always regretted missing with his first shot. He doesn’t like that peacock at all, and he’s always been looking for an excuse to have another go at it. Heather loved the story about Ronan’s father shooting the magpie, but he was afraid that she’d find out the truth someday. She loves the peacock, and a story about it being shot at with a crossbow could really kill the romance. A few weeks later, there was another party at his parents’ house – it was for my aunt and uncle’s thirtieth wedding anniversary – and Ronan was very nervous about this one. He was convinced that Heather would mention the story about shooting the magpie. On the day of the party, his niece and nephew, Daisy and Graham, were at the house with their mother. Daisy loves the peacock too, but she thought he was slightly off-form on this day. Aunt Bridget said that he hadn’t been eating much over the previous few days, so Daisy decided to get some food for him. She went around the garden collecting earthworms and she brought them all back to the peacock, but the bird wasn’t interested in them at all. Daisy put the earthworms on the ground and tried to arrange them so they’d spell the word ‘food’, but the worms kept moving. By the time she had the D in place, the F would have moved away. The best she could do was ‘ood’. She spent half an hour trying to get the word right, but then she wondered if the peacock could actually read. There was no point trying to get the word right if he couldn’t read. She thought about how she’d test him and she came up with the idea of writing a message in the earth and seeing if the peacock would respond to it. So she wrote the words ‘The cat is hiding in the cupboard in the shed’. The peacock always loved scaring the cat, but he took no notice of the note. Daisy wondered if this meant he couldn’t read or that he just wasn’t in the mood for scaring the cat. She left the peacock and went inside. When her brother, Graham, saw the note in the soil he went straight to the shed. He tapped the side of the cupboard and listened, but he couldn’t hear anything. He tapped louder and listened again, but still nothing. The cat was obviously sound asleep, and Graham was determined to wake it up (he loved scaring the cat as much as the peacock did). He took a few steps back and ran into the side of the cupboard. The whole thing shook, and a can of paint fell from the top. As Graham was running out the door he looked back and saw the paint spilling over the floor. During the party in the evening, Daisy went outside to look for the peacock, but she couldn’t find it in the garden so she went to the shed, and she saw the paint on the floor. Uncle Harry joined her shortly afterwards. When he saw the paint he asked her what happened and she said, “The peacock did it. He can read.” “Not for much longer,” Harry said as he went to get his crossbow. This was just the excuse he’d been looking for to have another shot at the peacock. An hour after Heather arrived, she still hadn’t said a word about the magpie, and Ronan was starting to relax. She said that she’d like to sing a song for everyone, and play the piano. At first he was all in favour of this idea – she had a great voice and she was an excellent pianist – but then she said she’d written a song especially for the occasion. It was about how his father proposed to his mother; the shooting of the magpie with the crossbow and all that. Before Ronan could stop her, she went to the piano and sat down. Aunt Bridget asked for silence because she wanted everyone to hear how good Heather was. Ronan had to think quickly. He needed to stop the performance, and one idea sprang to mind. When he was young he fell and hit his head off the edge of the table. Everyone paid attention to him then, so he decided to have another go at that. Just as she started playing, and just as Ronan was getting ready for his fall, everyone in the room looked out the window. The peacock was running around the lawn outside, being followed by Harry with the crossbow. He was waiting for the bird to stop moving before shooting. Everyone in the room saw what was going on, apart from Heather. She continued with her song about Harry shooting a magpie to retrieve the engagement ring for Bridget, but no one listened to it. Ronan put his fall on hold. He didn’t want Heather to stop playing now because he didn’t want her to look out the window and see his father about to shoot the peacock with the crossbow. Just as the song was about to end, Harry finally fired the arrow, but he missed, and the peacock was able to get away. Everyone in the room remembered the song then. They all applauded loudly when Heather stopped playing. She said to Bridget, “I hope it was an accurate portrayal of what happened, with the crossbow in the orchard.” And my aunt said, “Oh yes. That was exactly what happened.”

The moose’s head over the fireplace seems to be smiling to himself about something and I think I know what it is. I was watching a TV show with Iris last night and there was a horse wearing a hair net on it. The hair net made the horse look stupid, and the moose would be all in favour of horses looking stupid. The clocks went back at the weekend. It’ll be a long time before I can look out the window in the evening and see daylight again. Yes, the moose’s head is definitely smiling to himself about something.