Coffee, Spotty.

We’ve had a lot of rain recently so I haven’t been doing anything in the garden. I’ve spent a lot of time in the shed, doing this or that. Mostly just looking out at the rain, but it’s a nice way to pass the time. There’s no chance of making it even as far as the shed today. The words ‘severe weather warning’ featured very prominently in the weather forecast (expressions that begin with ‘severe’ and end with ‘warning’ are always likely to be prominent) and it looks as if they’re right.

My aunt Joyce once hurt her leg when she tripped on a step, and she was told to rest it for a few weeks. Uncle Cyril thought he’d get a few weeks rest from Aunt Joyce if she was confined to one space, but he saw the downside to the set-up as soon as he wanted a cup of coffee. He didn’t know what to do then. His wife had always made the coffee for him. He looked around the kitchen and he saw his dog, Spotty, sitting on the floor. He knew it was a bit of a long shot, but he decided to ask the dog to get him a coffee, so he said, “Coffee, Spotty.” The dog didn’t get him a coffee, but he did bring a shoe. At least he did something. Cyril patted him on the head and said, “Good dog.” Every time he wanted a coffee after that, he’d hold out his cup and say, “Coffee, Spotty,” and the dog always did something, even though he never did what he was told to do, but Cyril believed that if monkeys could write the works of Shakespeare if they were given enough time, then surely Spotty could get him a cup of coffee. Making coffee must be easier than writing the works of Shakespeare, although Uncle Cyril wasn’t planning on doing either. This was just before Christmas, and after they put up the Christmas tree, Cyril asked the dog for a coffee one morning and Spotty knocked over the tree. That definitely wasn’t what he was supposed to do, but it was fun to watch anyway. When my cousin Hugh and his fiancée, Annabel, called around to visit, they saw Cyril hold out his coffee cup and say, “Coffee, Spotty.” The dog tore a bag of flour to pieces. Cyril patted him on the head and said, “Good dog.” Hugh visited his uncle again with his family on Christmas Day. His grandmother had given him a sweater that showed Santa feeding Rudolf, and he was wearing this at the time, but only because he thought there was a chance that Spotty would destroy it. He took the sweater off when he said he was too hot, and he got the dog to sniff it. He left the sweater on a chair and waited until Cyril wanted his next coffee. When my uncle asked the dog for a coffee, Spotty ran to the room where Hugh left the sweater. Hugh followed him there, but he took his time. When he got there, he saw the sweater on the ground, but it hadn’t been damaged at all. Then he remembered that Aunt Joyce’s stamp collection had been on the chair beneath the sweater. The whole collection was full of stamps with swear words in them (she’s been collecting stamps with swear words for decades, but it’s still a fairly small collection because of the rarity of those particular stamps). The stamp album was open on the ground in front of Spotty. Hugh picked it up and he noticed that some of the stamps were missing. He had been looking through that stamp album since he was five, so he was familiar with every item in the collection. As far as he could tell, there were about ten stamps missing, and he assumed that Spotty must have eaten them, but Hugh had a feeling that he’d get blamed for it, and not the dog. He decided to try making replacement stamps himself, even though he knew his aunt would hardly fall for it, but he thought it was worth trying anyway. Some of the stamps he drew himself, and with others he used existing stamps and wrote swear words on them. He found a stamp with an image of a dog and he wrote the word ‘Spotty’ on it. He put the stamp on a postcard and he kept showing it to Spotty, even though he knew that the dog would hardly understand the point he was trying to make. A few days after Christmas, Hugh went around to Cyril and Joyce’s house to cut some firewood because his aunt still wasn’t fit enough to do these jobs. When he finished the firewood, he went into the kitchen and made himself a cup of coffee. The weather forecast was on the TV at the time, and Hugh always kept a close eye on the weather forecast over the Christmas holidays because his cousin Graham was in it. The TV company had decided to get school kids to act out the weather over the Christmas holidays, and Graham’s class were chosen for this. To illustrate rain, the whole class wore rain coats and looked very sad as they stood in the middle of a field. On this particular day, they were illustrating wind. Graham was playing a postman whose letters were blown all over the place during a storm. He was running after them, but before he put them into his bag, he held each letter up to the camera, with a big smile on his face, and the stamps were clearly visible. Hugh was shocked to see the stamps with swear words that had gone missing from the collection. Spotty hadn’t eaten them at all. Hugh had just put his cup of coffee on the kitchen table, and he was on the way to the fridge to get the milk, but he stood in the middle of the kitchen, staring at the TV in shock. Uncle Cyril saw the cup of coffee on the table and he thought he could do with one himself. He held out his cup and said, “Coffee, Spotty.” Hugh was still transfixed by the stamps on the weather forecast, so he didn’t notice the dog jump up in front of him and catch his sweater in his mouth. The dog pulled Hugh forward, and he hit his head off the worktop, knocking him unconscious for a while. Uncle Cyril saw Hugh on the ground and the cup of coffee on the table. Hugh wouldn’t be having that coffee at all now, so Cyril could have it himself. Spotty really had got him a cup of coffee. He rubbed the dog’s head and said, “Good dog. Well done, Spotty.” The dog wagged his tail. Cyril was just as happy. A dog who could get him a cup of coffee was much better than one who’d bring the newspaper or retrieve dead birds. Or write the works of Shakespeare – they’ve already been written anyway.

The moose’s head over the fireplace didn’t look happy when I walked into the room, and at first I thought he must be thinking about horses. He hates horses. If there’s horse racing on the television, I have to turn the volume down. But I wondered why he’d have been thinking about horses then. I looked out the window. The only sound was from the clock in the hall. I couldn’t think of anything that would remind him of horses. But it can be difficult to know what he’s thinking about at times.

What's in the box?

The trees are getting barer and the air is getting colder, but the garden always looks great at this time of year. There are leaves all over the lawns and the trees are gradually becoming a rust colour. There’s no point in raking the leaves; there are plenty more yet to fall. The best thing to do is just sit on a garden seat and watch them, and listen to the sound of the birds.

My cousin June has a habit of buying stupid things. People always go to her if they want to sell something stupid and she just can’t resist buying these things. She once bought a clock in the shape of a phone, and she regretted buying it straightaway but she didn’t want to admit that she had made a mistake, so she put it on the sideboard, despite the objections of the kids and her husband, Dan. Then she bought a little plastic ornament for the goldfish tank. It was a man in a rowing boat with a fishing rod hanging over the side. The kids didn’t like the look of that, but then they loved it when one of the goldfish pulled on the fishing line and the boat turned over. June left the boat like that because the goldfish kept pulling on the fishing line every time she put the boat the right way up, and she thought that the boat might distract the kids from the fish themselves. Every time one of the fish died, they got another one in the pet shop without telling the kids, and the kids have never noticed any of the new fish, despite a few small differences. Dan has a friend called Terry who always seems to have stupid things to sell, and June often buys things from him, but she decided to give up buying stupid things after the clock and the boat for the goldfish tank. One day he called around and offered her a box of champagne, and June asked him if he meant a bottle. He said, “No, it’s in a box,” and June said, “Oh… Like a carton?” “No, it’s in a box.” She wasn’t tempted to buy that at all, so it was easy to say no, but then she wondered what a box of champagne would look like. She couldn’t stop thinking about it, and on the following day she told Terry that she’d like to buy it after all, but he said he had already sold it. She asked him if he could get another and he said, “No. It was sort of a one-off. I could get you a bottle.” She wasn’t interested in the bottle at all. She was kicking herself for not buying the box of champagne, and she decided to buy the next thing that was offered to her, no matter how stupid it was. So when Terry offered to sell her a duck she bought it without even thinking about it. Dan wasn’t too happy about their latest pet. He was never happy with the stupid things she bought, but June thought he was acting a bit odd. The duck was acting strangely too. June didn’t really know what normal behaviour for a duck would be, but this one seemed to spend most of its time sleeping, so they called it Sleepy. And when Sleepy wasn’t sleeping he was staring at the goldfish tank. At first they thought he was staring at the fish but when June took the plastic boat out of the tank, Sleepy lost interest in it. They had a party in the house one night and everyone had a great time, even though Sleepy slept through most of it. By the end of the night they were all singing a song, and Dan was singing along too, even though he didn’t know the words. He made up his own words as he went along, but he stopped straightaway when he realised that he had just sung the line ‘like the night we stole the duck’ (it was probably just as well that he stopped before he had to come up with a word that rhymed with ‘duck’). He looked over at June and she was staring back at him. She heard the line about the duck. After the party he denied that they had knowingly stolen the duck. He said that they went to the pub and on the way back they decided to do a bit of fishing on the lake, and then when Terry woke up on the following morning there was a duck roaming around his house. June thought it sounded unlikely that they’d go fishing late in the night after an evening in the pub, and she wondered where they’d get the rods, but then she remembered the duck staring at the upturned boat in the fish tank. Dan admitted that they had had a slight accident in the boat and it turned over, and the story made sense to June. The little plastic man with the fishing rod in the upturned boat would remind the duck of that scene he witnessed at the lake, just before they stole him, but Dan insisted that they couldn’t remember stealing the duck. They had to wait a few months until Christmas before finally figuring out how they had ‘stolen’ the duck. When they put the Christmas decorations up around the house the duck was transfixed by the tinsel, and Dan remembered that on the night they went out on the lake, Terry had a box of tinsel with him. He bought it off someone in the pub who had won it in a golf tournament, and he was ashamed to admit that he won a box of tinsel playing golf. They left the box on the side of the lake, and the duck must have fallen asleep in it. When Dan was doing some Christmas shopping he saw a clock in the shape of a phone exactly like the one at home, or the one that used to be at home. The one that June bought had gone missing. Dan wasn’t sorry to see it go, but he knew that his wife would love to have another one, and this one in the shop looked a lot like the one she had before, with just a few small differences. So he bought it and brought it home. The duck seemed to be asleep, but as soon as Dan took the clock out of the box he woke up and waddled over to Dan. Sleepy stared at the clock, just like he stared at the boat in the fish tank, and Dan suddenly remembered what had become of the old clock. The reason they had gone out in the boat that night was to throw the clock into the lake. He put it back in the box just before June came into the room. She said, “What’s in the box?” Dan thought quickly. He took the clock out of the box and said, “I found your old clock.” She was delighted to see it again. He told her it was in the shed all along, and he blamed the kids for putting it there. He hoped she wouldn’t notice the little differences between this one and the old one, like the kids with the goldfish. And he also hoped that she wouldn’t wonder why the duck was so transfixed by it.

The moose’s head over the fireplace is still angry with me for suggesting that he was a friend of Rupert the Bear. I’m not entirely sure why I said that. We were having a party and I had a few drinks at the time. On the following day I wasn’t entirely sure I had said it at all, but then I saw the moose’s head and he looked angry with me, so I must have said it. I try to avoid eye contact. I’ve been doing my best not to look at him at all, but I have a feeling that this is making him even more angry.

The Prime Minister ate it.

In the evenings there isn’t time to do much in the garden before it gets dark. You can’t trim the hedges if it’s too dark, but you can’t do it if you can’t find the hedge clippers anyway. I walked all around the gardens looking for them and they were in the shed all along. But it was a nice walk. As the stars started to come out, I saw the headlights of a car slowly moving down a road on a hill a few miles away.

My uncle Ben once turned on the TV in the evening to see the news, but he turned on the wrong channel and instead of a newsreader he saw a cat staring back at him. The cat just sat there, slowly moving its tail around. At first my uncle wondered if this was really the news, but the cat was clearly trying to communicate something with the movement of its tail. Ben assumed that the cat was the latest newsreader, and he watched it every day. He stared at the cat staring back at him and after a few weeks he was just starting to decipher the meaning of the news (on one evening he thought the cat was saying something about a dog) but he realised that he was looking at the wrong channel when he was visiting his son one evening. His son, my cousin Mike, lives just down the road with his wife, Louise, and their eight-year-old son, Scott. Ben went to their house for dinner one day and he showed them the cat on the news, but they showed him the woman who read the news on the other channel. It all made perfect sense to my uncle at first, but then he wondered what the cat was actually doing if it wasn’t reading the news. Scott and Louise wondered about this too. They turned over to the other channel and stared at the cat, who still just stared back at them, slowly moving its tail around. They watched the cat every day, trying to figure out why it was there, but they couldn’t think of anything. They asked Scott what he thought of it. He had been watching a TV show about a puppy over the previous few weeks. In the first three episodes, the puppy would just run around with his tail wagging, knocking things over and chewing anything he could get his mouth around. Then Scott missed an episode, and when he saw the next one the puppy had become the Prime Minister. Scott never figured out how he managed to get this job. The puppy himself didn’t seem to be too aware of his new role, but his owner often used his pet’s position of power. They had once been thrown out of a café because the puppy ran around the place under the tables, annoying all the customers and the staff, so they returned to that café and the manager couldn’t ask them to leave because the puppy was the Prime Minister. The puppy was given a few cakes to eat, and he made a bit of a mess but there was nothing the staff could do about it. So when Scott was asked what he thought of the cat on TV he said, “Well the puppy is the Prime Minister, so I suppose the cat must be the opposition.” This made sense to his mother. “Oh right,” she said. “So this must be like a Party Political Broadcast.” The general election was just a few weeks away, so they all stared at the cat again, trying to decipher the opposition position from the movement of the cat’s tail. And when the candidates called to the door to canvas for votes, they stared at them too, but they didn’t hear anything that would make them vote one way or the other. Then a few days before the election the electricity went, and they missed the cat’s Party Political Broadcast, so they stared at their own cat instead. The cat didn’t seem to like being stared at. She ran outside, and when they followed her out she ran up a tree. My cousin Mike had to climb the tree to get her down, and he was scratched by both the cat and the branches in the tree. The cat had been such a nuisance that they all decided to vote for the government in the election. On the following day they went to visit Mike’s cousin Hector, and he had just got a new Labrador puppy who spent most of that evening clinging to the legs of either Mike, Louise or my uncle Ben. He was just as annoying as the cat and it left them undecided again. On the evening before the election the cat rubbed off their legs, and for a while this convinced them to vote for the opposition, but they visited Hector again that evening and the puppy didn’t go for their legs at all. He licked their faces and gave them the paw when they asked for it. This convinced them to vote for the government, and the government were returned to power in that election. They regretted it later. The next time they visited Hector the puppy clung to their legs and wouldn’t let go. But then the cat was still annoying them too. She got stuck up the tree again, and Mike nearly fell out of it when he tried to get her down.

The moose’s head over the fireplace seemed to doze off after I lit the fire. I was talking to my wife about something and when I said the word ‘lobster’, out of the corner of my eye I noticed the moose’s eyes widening. I looked up at him and he was definitely wide awake again. I went to the window and looked out. It was completely dark then, and the sky was full of stars. I said the word ‘lobster’ and turned around. The moose’s head was still wide awake. He must have been hungry.

A Game of Chess.

There are brown patches in the trees now, and leaves on the lawns, but there’s still a lot of green in the trees too. I spent an hour raking some of the leaves from the grass while my wife, Iris, talked about a stone wall her sister is building. She’s been working on it for weeks now and it’s just starting to take shape.

My cousin Hector loved playing chess, even though he always lost. He persevered because he knew he’d beat someone someday, and after coming home from the pub one evening he saw his chance to win. He decided to play a game against the Labrador puppy he’d just bought for his daughters, but he lost that too, and he couldn’t figure out how the puppy had won. If Hector was a better chess player he might have understood why he lost. If he hadn’t just come back from the pub he might have been slightly better at chess, so he decided to play the puppy again when he was completely sober. He knew he’d have to be at his best – he shouldn’t have just taken it for granted that he’d win. He always had to keep an eye out for that puppy. If he looked away for a second, the puppy would run to his leg and attach himself to it. Hector’s wife had got a present of a snow dome, and in it there was a tiny figure of a man. There was a puppy clinging to the man’s leg. Hector used to shake the snow dome and watch the man with the puppy in the snow shower. He was very impressed with the way the puppy was able to cling to the man’s leg despite the storm around them, and he always used it as a reminder to keep an eye out for their own puppy. His next game of chess with the Labrador didn’t last long. Hector’s daughters, Alice and Grace, loved gluing things to things, and they had glued a feather to their father’s King on the chess board. When the puppy saw it he jumped onto the board and ran off with the feather and the King. Hector assumed that this meant the puppy had won again, but at least he knew how the puppy had won this time. Alice and Grace loved that snow dome with the man and the dog stuck to his leg. They loved the idea of seeing that scene in real life too. They convinced their father to have another game of chess with the puppy. The King with the feather was still missing, but the girls told their father that he should use a dog biscuit instead of a King because this was the only way the puppy would play (they said he was getting tired of winning so easily). So the puppy sat at one side of the chess board and Hector sat opposite him with a dog biscuit for a King. For most of the time they were both completely still, just staring at each other. If the puppy made the slightest movement, Hector would put his hand over the dog biscuit. He said to himself that chess was a much simpler game than he had thought before, and he was getting better at it too. His games rarely lasted this long. After ten minutes of staring, Alice pointed to something behind her father and said, “What’s that?” Hector turned around, and when he turned back the puppy was running away with the biscuit. My cousin wasn’t going to give in so easily, so he chased the puppy. It was snowing outside, and someone had left the back door open. The puppy ran outside and Hector followed him. He saw a brush leaning against the wall near the door, and that was just what he needed then. The puppy always chased the brush. Hector picked it up, but there was something sticky on the handle, and his hands became stuck to the brush. The puppy stood in the snow, looking at Hector trying to remove his hands from the handle, but then the puppy seemed to make a realisation. He ran towards Hector, but instead of going for the brush he went straight for his leg. The puppy clung to his leg and wouldn’t let go. Hector couldn’t remove him because his hands were otherwise engaged. He tried shaking him off, but the puppy still wouldn’t let go. Hector conceded defeat in the game of chess. He looked over at Alice and Grace, and they looked as if they had just won something too. They were jumping up and down in the snow, and one of them had a camera. When their father fell over the puppy still clung to his leg.

The moose’s head over the fireplace looked very happy when I walked into the room, which was a nice change. For the past few days he looked very suspicious. Confused too, but mostly suspicious. He overheard something on the TV about someone being elected President without any election taking place, and ever since then he had that look of confusion and suspicion on his face. But he’s finally figured it out now and he looks very happy.