The Window.

We got our white Christmas this year, and a proper white Christmas too. The snow covered everything. Apparently it’s been about fifty years since that last happened.

My cousin Craig once won a chess tournament, but the trophy he was presented with was a foot-high replica of a window with open Venetian blinds. Nobody explained to him why he was getting a replica of a window, and he felt that a man who just won a chess tournament should be able to figure these things out for himself, so he never asked. During the presentation of the trophy and in the photos, he tried his best to look as if he knew the reason for the window. When he brought the trophy home he acted as if it was blatantly obvious why they gave him a window for winning a chess tournament, so people pretended that they knew the reason too, but he always got the impression that they didn’t know either, until his cousin Jane saw the trophy and asked him what it was for. He told her about the chess tournament and she just said, “Yeah,” and nodded her head. She seemed to understand it, and Craig tried to think of a way of finding out why she thought they gave him a window. He didn’t want to ask her in case she realised he didn’t know himself, so he waited until his mother, my aunt Joyce, came into the room and he said to her, “Jane was just admiring my chess trophy.” Jane said, “Yeah, it’s very nice.” People who were pretending to know why they gave him a window were always nervous when talking about it, and they tried to change the subject, but Jane wasn’t like that at all. Aunt Joyce noticed this and she saw a way of finally finding out why they gave her son a window. She said to Jane, “So why do you think they gave Craig a window?” Jane said, “It’s because of the time he cheated when he was playing cards. He said he was going to the toilet but he went outside and he looked in the window to see someone else’s cards.” This made perfect sense to his mother. She said, “Ohh. So they think you cheated. But obviously I knew that all along.” Craig wasn’t entirely satisfied with this explanation. He insisted that he didn’t cheat, but Jane said, “If the blinds were closed, that would have meant that you won it fair and square, but because the blinds are open, it means they think you cheated.” “I did not cheat.” “But they think you cheated. Why else would they give you a window with open Venetian blinds?” Craig couldn’t answer that question before and he couldn’t come up with a better answer then. He just said, “I did not cheat.” But his mother winked at him and said, “Fair enough.” Everyone heard the story of Craig cheating at chess, and the trophy was a constant reminder of this. His parents were having a party and all the relatives were invited, but Craig wasn’t looking forward to it because everyone would ask about the cheating. He had to find a way to prove that he didn’t cheat, so he decided to go through the game move by move just to show that he won it fair and square. Jane arrived early on the day of the party, and he got her to observe this re-run of the game. My cousin Hector had arrived early too, with his daughters, Alice and Grace. He’d been fishing with the girls a few days earlier, but after an hour he hadn’t caught anything and Alice suggested he use a buttercup as bait. He told her that fish don’t go for buttercups, but after another hour he still hadn’t caught anything, and Alice suggested it again. Just to humour her, he put a buttercup on the hook and cast the line. Within five minutes he had caught a fish. Hector thought it must have been a fairly stupid fish, so he called it Dopey. Alice was delighted that her suggestion had worked, but on the following day she realised why her father had called the fish Dopey. Hector obviously didn’t think much of her method, and Alice thought he could do with a more dramatic illustration of its efficacy. ‘Revenge’ is the word most people would use instead of ‘a more dramatic illustration of its efficacy’. Alice didn’t use those words either, but that’s what she was thinking. Aunt Joyce and Uncle Cyril have a dog called Spotty. One of Cyril’s favourite possessions is a clock shaped like a teapot, but Joyce doesn’t like it at all. She once said something about throwing it out, and Cyril was afraid that she’d do it behind his back. So he trained Spotty to bark whenever he saw someone holding the clock. When Hector was in the back garden, he noticed a buttercup on a path, and then he noticed another one a few feet away, and another one a few feet beyond that. He saw a trail of buttercups that led around the house, so he followed it. It led him to a clock shaped like a teapot on the front lawn. He picked it up and wondered why someone would leave a clock in the garden. Craig and Jane were in the front room. Craig was recreating the final of the chess tournament and Jane was observing it to make sure he didn’t cheat. But he got to a point in the game where he couldn’t remember his opponent’s next move. He paced from one side of the room to the other, trying to think. Jane heard a noise from the front garden. She went to the window and looked out. She saw Hector running around the lawn with a clock shaped like a teapot in his hand, being chased by Spotty, with Alice and Grace nearby taking photos. She looked out the window for a few minutes, trying to figure out what was going on. When she finally remembered the chess game she turned around and saw Craig standing at the other side of the chess board, with his hands behind his back. “Ahhh,” she said. “So that’s how you cheated.”

The moose’s head over the fireplace has been looking at me very suspiciously, and I can’t say I blame him. A friend of the wife asked me if I shot it myself. I said, “No. I don’t know who shot it. It’s been in my family for generations.” I said that very emphatically to make sure the moose got the message. Just for the record, I didn’t shoot it myself. I don’t know who shot it. It’s been in the family for generations.

Monkeys Operating Radio Transmitters (a Christmas story).

It’s after getting very cold again recently. The possibility of a white Christmas has been raised. Well, the possibility of a white Christmas is always raised, but normally just to say how unlikely it is. This year it’s possible. The garden looks great under a covering of snow, and the landscape for miles around.

My cousin June had a habit of buying stupid things. When she came across soup bowls with images at the bottom of monkeys operating radio transmitters, she couldn’t resist buying them. She used to say to the kids, “If you see a monkey operating a radio transmitter, you’ve finished your soup.” The kids, Daisy and Graham, were watching a TV show about Santa in the weeks leading up to Christmas. Preparations for Christmas were going according to plan at the North Pole, but then the reindeer went missing, and Santa found a note saying that they’d been kidnapped. He nearly gave up on Christmas then. He didn’t know how he’d get around the world without the reindeer, but one of the elves came up with the idea of using monkeys to pull the sleigh. So they got eight monkeys and they put little antlers on their heads, but one of them was wearing headphones, like the monkeys in the soup bowls. The antlers confused the kids, and the one wearing the headphones didn’t help clarify the situation. Surely the monkeys would be just as effective without the antlers. Or ineffective. Surely monkeys can’t pull a sleigh through the sky. But then if reindeer can do it, why not monkeys? June bought some soup bowls with images of reindeer at the bottom, but she didn’t tell the kids about them. She wanted it to be a surprise, and she watched closely as they ate their soup, but instead of looking surprised, the kids just looked confused. They were even more confused when they watched the TV show and found that the monkeys had been replaced by sheep. The monkeys were giving Santa headaches because he couldn’t get them to work as a team, but the sheep often just stood there looking at him when he wanted them to move, and he was thinking of giving the monkeys another chance. June got tiny little antlers for their two pet rabbits, and she was sure the kids would love this, but again, they just looked confused. And then Santa tried using cats instead of the reindeer, sheep and monkeys, but they weren’t as good as the monkeys. June’s pet duck, Sleepy, loved the Christmas decorations, especially the tinsel (see ‘What’s in the box?’ from the October archive for the explanation of why the duck loves tinsel). On Christmas Eve, June remembered that she had another box of tinsel in the attic. The duck was delighted with himself when she brought this down. She put the little antlers on his head and he looked even happier. Daisy and Graham watched the TV show on Christmas Eve. The reindeer were back again, and they’d never even been kidnapped. They just got sick of working in the cold weather so they wrote the note about the kidnapping themselves and they all went to Rio. They loved living on the beach in Rio, but the people there got sick of them because they kept bursting the beach balls and beach volleyballs with their antlers. The reindeer believed that the object of beach volleyball was to burst the ball with their antlers, so they thought they were doing really well, and they loved doing it. Santa was very angry with them when they came home. He said he wouldn’t let them pull the sleigh that night, and he insisted on using the monkeys or the sheep or whatever else he could find the pull it. Daisy and Graham couldn’t wait for Santa to come, but mainly because they wanted to see what would be pulling his sleigh. They didn’t know what to expect, although they knew it was unlikely to be rabbits. Early on Christmas morning, they woke when they heard a noise from up above. It definitely wasn’t the sound of reindeer’s hooves, but it could have been monkeys. It definitely wasn’t rabbits. Then they heard what sounded like the quack of a duck, but they thought it couldn’t possibly be a duck. How could ducks pull a sleigh through the sky? June heard the noise too, and she realised that Sleepy must have fallen asleep in the box for the tinsel. Her husband, Dan, had put the box back in the attic, and Sleepy must have only just woken up. She told Dan to get the duck down from the attic when he was putting the presents under the tree. The kids heard the footsteps above and they assumed it was Santa, and their father really did look like Santa. He dressed up in the red suit and beard just in case the kids came downstairs and saw him putting the presents under the tree, which they did, but they weren’t interested in Santa at all. They just stared at the duck with the antlers. They were shocked when they saw that it really was a duck, but then they realised that ducks can actually fly. Monkeys, reindeer and sheep can’t fly. The idea of reindeer flying around the world is ridiculous, but ducks could do it. Dan was afraid that they’d recognise him. He put on a very deep voice when he said ‘ho ho ho’ and ‘merry Christmas’. He left as quickly as he could, but they didn’t even notice him going. When he came back downstairs a few minutes later with June, the kids were still staring at the duck. June was surprised to see that they hadn’t even touched their presents. She reminded them of the presents, and they finally opened them, but they kept looking over at the duck as they removed the wrapping paper. There was a lot of bubble wrap around the train set they got for Graham, and the duck started popping it with his beak. The kids completely forgot about their presents and just stared at him. June and Dan would have understood if the kids were happier playing with the bubble wrap rather than with their presents (that’s happened before), but they couldn’t understand how they’d be even happier watching the duck playing with the bubble wrap. When June asked them why, Graham pointed at the duck bursting the bubble wrap and said, “He thinks he’s in Rio.” When Sleepy went to sleep in one of the boxes, Daisy and Graham just looked down at him. This is how they spent most of the day. June and Dan spent most of Christmas Day staring at the kids as they stared at the duck.

The moose’s head over the fireplace looks as if he loves Christmas. That’s the way I choose to interpret the expression on his face. The wife has put a Santa hat on his antlers and a white beard on his face. I suggested just putting a red nose on his nose to make him into a reindeer. That would have been the obvious one, but the wife tends to go overboard with these things. The advantage of the beard is that we can’t see the real expression on his face. There’s always a chance that he would have been happier without any decorations at all, but you’re better off not even thinking about that and focusing on the permanently cheerful expression on his face.

With a mop.

When you go to the back of the garden you can see for miles around. It’s nice to stand there as the sun goes down, sometimes looking at the lights of a car on a distant road, and not seeing any Christmas lights at all. Just occasionally it’s nice not to see Christmas lights.

My uncle Ben went to boarding school when he was young and he was always seen as the intelligent one in the family because of his expensive education. His grandson, Scott, went to a normal school, but his parents often worried about the quality of his education. When he came home from school one afternoon, his mother said to him, “What did you learn in school today?” Scott held up his finger. There was a piece of Selotape stuck to it. His mother asked him again what he’d learnt. He pointed to his finger and said, “We learnt how to do that.” She just stared at him for a while, and then she mentioned something about the benefits of boarding school. She didn’t really mean it, but Scott believed there was a real chance he’d be sent away if he didn’t improve academically. So the next day when he came home from school and his mother asked him what he’d learnt, he held up his hand and this time there was a pencil case stuck to it. He thought this was a huge improvement on the piece of Selotape, but his mother just stared at him again. At first he wondered if it was a look of awe or pity. The longer the look went on, the more he went for the latter. He could feel the possibility of boarding school growing all the time. On one Saturday, my cousin Hector came to visit with his wife and his two daughters, Alice and Grace, and they were able to take Scott’s mind off things. He had a pet mouse called Mousey (he couldn’t think of a better name), and they spent a lot of time playing with Mousey. Grace always associated mice with blindness because of the song ‘Three Blind Mice’. When the mouse got tired of playing with them, Grace said, “He’s probably just blind.” Alice asked her why she thought the mouse would be blind, and it was only then she realised that the only reason she associated mice with blindness was because of the song, so she said, “Three out of every… four mice are blind.” Scott had never thought of that before, but it would explain why Mousey runs around aimlessly at times. Scott’s grandfather, my uncle Ben, dropped by too. The kids always asked him questions when he was around because he was so intelligent. There was a painting of a ship in the hall, and Grace asked Ben how they clean ships. He said, “With a mop.” A few minutes later, Alice asked him how they clean horses and he also said, “With a mop.” That was the answer he gave when they asked how trees, mice and roller coasters are cleaned, and the kids started to wonder if he really was as intelligent as everyone believed him to be. What finally convinced him that he wasn’t very clever was when Grace asked him how they clean space ships and he said, “With a mop.” Scott realised that he if could convince his mother that his grandfather didn’t benefit intellectually from his stay in the boarding school, then she’d forget the idea of sending him there. He told Alice and Grace about his problem and they said they’d surely come up with some way of highlighting Ben’s lack of intelligence. They saw the perfect opportunity when they met Ben in the hall later in the day. He was looking back and forth between a barometer and his watch. He said that his watch was slow and he wanted to find the right time. Scott said that the clock on the mantelpiece in the sitting room is always right, and Ben said he’d check it later. Alice came up with the idea of putting the barometer on the mantelpiece instead of the clock, and if Scott’s mother, Louise, saw Ben looking at the barometer and saying, “This clock doesn’t work,” she’d see that he’s not as clever as everyone thinks he is. So they took the barometer from the wall and put it on the mantelpiece. They hid the clock. Scott had Mousey with him, and he put the mouse on the mantelpiece as they were making the switch. As the mouse was walking across the mantelpiece, he went behind a vase, pushing it forward. It rocked for a while and then fell over, breaking on the tiles below. “See! I told you he was blind,” Grace said. They were able to glue the vase together again, and they put it back on the mantelpiece. They just had to leave the room for a while and wait for Ben to come in and try to check the time on the barometer. As they were leaving, Grace saw Mousey on the ground. She thought he’d get lost if he was left to run around on his own, so she caught him by the tail and put him into the vase for his own safety. They went to watch TV in another room. When Ben went into the sitting room to check the time he went to the barometer, but he couldn’t make head nor tail of it. This was just like the clock in the hall. He wondered if this clock had stopped, so he bent over and put his ear near it to listen for a ticking sound. He couldn’t hear anything from the clock, but he heard a noise from somewhere else on the mantelpiece. He slowly moved over towards the vase and he heard the noise again. He put his ear up against the vase. He could hear something scratching on the inside, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. In the other room, the kids were watching a documentary about space. An astronaut was talking to the camera, but the kids were much more interested in what was going on in the background. Another astronaut was cleaning the space shuttle, floating around the place with a mop in his hand. The kids realised that they were wrong about Ben. He really was as clever as everyone believed him to be. They rushed to the sitting room where they had left the barometer. Louise was already there, and so was Ben. He was walking around the room with the vase stuck to the side of his head and Louise was just staring at him, with a look of awe on her face, or at least that’s the way Scott read the look. He resigned himself to going to boarding school then. There he was, sticking pieces of Selotape to his finger or pencil cases to his hand, and he never once thought of sticking something to the side of his head, let alone a vase. The mouse raised his head over the top of the vase and Scott put his head in his hands. He just stuck a piece of Selotape to his finger and his grandfather stuck a vase with a mouse in it to the side of his head, a blind mouse. Scott saw his grandfather as a genius after that, but he never was sent to boarding school. He assumed it was because his parents believed that he’d never reach the academic heights of his grandfather.

The moose’s head over the fireplace is looking very happy with himself after he had a good laugh at my expense. I was looking around the room for my glasses, and every time I turned my back I thought I heard him laughing. The thought eventually dawned on me that he was laughing at me because I’d left the glasses on top of my head, but when I put my hand on my head they weren’t there at all. I found them a few hours later. They were hanging around my neck. I didn’t even know I had one of those things for hanging them around my neck.

Piano Lessons.

I put a new door on one of the old sheds at the back of the garden. The door was on the point of falling apart, but I put up a new one. I’m quite proud of that fact.

My cousin June enrolled her kids, Daisy and Graham, in piano classes. The teacher used to divide her students into two groups based on their abilities, but she didn’t want to suggest that one group was better than the other (even though one of them clearly was) so she referred to the classes as ‘The red class’ and ‘The blue class’. Both classes thought that they were the better one, but it was really The red class, of which Daisy was a member, which contained the greater talent. Her brother was in The blue class. Graham and his fellow classmates were convinced that they were better than the others, and to get around their lack of musical ability, they used to play very slowly. All of the pieces they played were sad. The students in The blue class were very serious and they seemed more artistic than the others, and people came to believe that The blue class really was the better one. The students in The red class started to believe this too. While The blue class were playing very artistic pieces, they were playing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. They lost confidence in their ability, and their performances were full of missed notes. Daisy and Graham practised on their aunt’s piano. She had a dog called Berry who used to sleep in the piano. Even when people played it he’d rarely wake up, but he always woke up when Graham was around. Graham once dressed as a dog warden for a Halloween party and he chased Berry around the place with a net. Daisy went as the Statue of Liberty and she chased the dog warden away. Graham and the dog haven’t got on very well since then. Berry always barks at him, and when Graham first sat down at the piano to practise, he heard a growling sound coming from inside. His aunt took the dog to the next room, where he fell asleep in front of the fire. The kids used to go to their aunt’s house almost every day in the weeks before a recital. The song Graham was going to play was just two notes played over and over again. Near the end of the song he played another two notes for a few bars, and then it was back to the first two. It wasn’t very complex, but he was note-perfect. Daisy’s tune was more complex, but she was losing confidence and making a lot of errors. She found it difficult to accept that her brother had greater musical ability than she had. She was very tempted to do something to disrupt his performance in the recital, and Graham’s repeated reminders of how he was a better pianist than her made it impossible to resist the temptation. She brought her aunt’s dog with her to the recital, supposedly for ‘moral support’ and nobody questioned this because they felt she needed all the support she could get, given her lack of musical talent. Berry loved Daisy after she rescued him from the dog warden. Before the recital began, she got the dog to go into the piano. She gave him a few biscuits and he fell asleep. The plan was that he’d start barking or growling as soon as Graham sat down at the piano, just like he did at their aunt’s house. Graham wasn’t on until near the end, just before his sister. Members of The blue class did much better than the red. One girl played a single note, and then a second note three minutes later. It got a huge round of applause, which only added to the pressure on Daisy’s classmates, and they didn’t cope well under that pressure. They made countless errors. Graham was full of confidence when he sat down at the piano. Daisy was full of excitement, but there wasn’t a sound from the dog, and for a while she was worried that Berry wouldn’t wake up. He did wake up, but instead of barking or growling, he wagged his tail when Graham started playing his song, the tail gently strumming the piano strings, going up the scale when Graham played the higher note, and down when he played the lower note. It was a beautiful sound, and the audience were amazed that Graham was able to produce it. He got a standing ovation at the end. Daisy was shocked, but she tried to focus on her own performance. She went onto the stage when the applause for her brother died down. She sat at the piano, but as soon as she played the first note, Berry started barking, and he barked at every note after that too. The audience couldn’t figure out how she could produce a sound like that from a piano, but it was nowhere near as nice as the last one. She got a very sympathetic round of applause at the end. When she retrieved the dog from the piano later, he was as friendly as ever towards her, and as unfriendly as ever towards her brother. The only explanation she could think of for this was that when the dog was listening to them practise from the other room he must have thought that she was playing the simple yet note-perfect tune and that Graham was playing the one with all the errors.

The moose’s head over the fireplace has been completely expressionless for days. One of my nephews opened a jack-in-the-box in front of it the other day, just to see if he’d react, but he didn’t react at all. I think he came very close to reacting, but he did his best to look completely impassive to show that he wasn’t surprised by the jack-in-the-box. And he’s still putting the effort into looking impassive.

It's Santa... Or...

The word ‘severe’ has started to reappear in the weather forecast. We had our first severe frost of the year over the weekend. I don’t mind the cold because at least it means the skies are clear. The setting sun lights up the branches of the bare trees in the garden. With a sky full of stars I watched a full moon rise from behind the trees.

My cousin Ted fell in love with a woman called Anne, but he believed it would always be an unrequited love. He thought she was out of his league. Everyone else thought so too. I certainly did. I remember saying that to him on more than one occasion, and his friends used every possible occasion to remind him. He knew that one day she’d slip beyond his grasp forever, and he saw that day fast approaching when she entered a beauty contest called Miss Today. Past winners were given the title Miss Yesterday Today, and the press referred to the favourite for the contest as Miss Tomorrow. The contestants always thought that the title Miss Tomorrow sounded better than Miss Today because it made them seem younger, so they all focussed on being Miss Tomorrow. At first this wasn’t a huge problem for the organisers of the contest because the person regarded as Miss Tomorrow was always the most likely to become Miss Today, but on one year a contestant called Misty Morrow was crowned Miss Tomorrow based on photographs, radio interviews and her name. She seemed perfect as a Miss Today, but she was focussing completely on becoming Miss Tomorrow, and in the Miss Today contest she revealed that one of her legs was three inches shorter than the other. She couldn’t really avoid revealing it then, given the nature of the dress code. Nobody noticed this in the photos because she was always sitting down with her legs crossed. All of the contestants were required to exhibit some skill, such as singing or playing a musical instrument. Hers was running in circles. The organisers of the contest realised that they had to do something to make the crown of Miss Today more attractive than Miss Tomorrow, and they went for the most obvious way. They doubled the prize money. Anne was desperate to win, and a lot of people thought she’d do it. She received a lot of attention from the local press in the months leading up to the contest, which only made Ted even more depressed about the situation. She seemed to be climbing further up the league table all the time, slipping out of his grasp. His friends used to make fun of him. They were in an elevator one day and one of them got out a marker and wrote: ‘Anne Murphy loves Ted Seaward-Shannon. That’s the other Anne Murphy – the one with the wooden shoulder.’ My cousin crossed out the bit about the other Anne Murphy, so it just said ‘Anne Murphy loves Ted Seaward-Shannon.’ A film was shot in the area a few months before the contest. The budget was running low near the end of the filming, and they still had to shoot a scene in a space craft. The director decided to film it in an elevator, as they went up and down. He thought this would make the weightlessness look more realistic. He didn’t notice the graffiti in the background, but everyone noticed it when the film came out. This was just a few weeks before the contest, and Anne was becoming a bit of a celebrity at the time. The press tracked down my cousin, and Anne received more attention than ever, so she played along with the story. She pretended that she loved Ted. It must have been a very difficult pretence to keep up, but she was hoping to be an actress, so she probably saw this role as practise. They spent a lot of time together before the contest, and she found that he wasn’t as stupid as she’d always believed him to be. She was starting to like him, but it was a long way from the love he felt for her. She narrowly missed out on the Miss Tomorrow title, but she was confident that she’d excel in the actual competition (Miss Tomorrow was only five foot tall). During the pageant, all of the contestants were asked questions about current affairs, and most of them didn’t understand the questions, but they all memorised the same sample question: “Which is better, good or bad?” And they memorised the answer ‘good’. In the pageant they chose the answer closest to ‘good’. It would be fatal to their chances if it looked as if they didn’t understand the question – giving the ‘bad’ answer would be preferable to that. The contestant before Anne was asked, “If war and peace fell over on the street, which one would you help to its feet first?” She didn’t even try to understand the question. She just said ‘peace’ straightaway and the audience applauded. Anne was doing a PhD in early English literature, and she thought she’d get by without memorising the sample question and answer. But the question she was asked was: “If Santa, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and a leprechaun were stuck in an elevator, who’d win?” All of the other contestants had answered their questions straightaway, but Anne just stared at the host. He eventually said, “Do you want me to repeat the question?” She said, “Yes, please,” and he read out the question again. This time she looked down at the stage, with her finger on her chin. After about thirty seconds, the host said, “Take as much time as you want.” She looked up at the lights above her and said, “Ahmmm…” Again there was a long silence, before she eventually said, “I’m not sure I understand the question.” It was the host’s turn to stare at her then. There was complete silence from the audience. Anne didn’t win the contest and she wasn’t one of the runners-up. She felt as if she’d slipped way down the league table, hovering above the relegation zone. Ted was there to talk about how stupid the whole contest was and how if he was in the elevator he would have won. That’s how he won her heart – the blow to her self-esteem and his claims about beating Santa, the Eater Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and a leprechaun in a lift.

The moose’s head over the fireplace looks slightly confused. I was working on a thousand-piece jigsaw in the room a few days ago. It was a photo of horses in a river, and as the image gradually took shape I could see the moose’s head becoming increasingly concerned. I had forgotten how much he hates horses. So I covered his eyes with a cloth and replaced the jigsaw of horses with one of a shovel. I think that’s the source of his confusion.