Feel Mahogany.

It’s nice to have proper evenings again, not just afternoons that go straight into night. I cut the grass yesterday ‘evening’.

My aunt Bridget was due to appear on a TV show called ‘Feel Mahogany’. Members of the public would bring antique furniture onto this show and experts would feel it. The piece of furniture didn’t necessarily have to be made out of mahogany, but it was preferred. The experts would talk about the texture and workmanship, and then they’d say what it would be worth if it was owned by a historically important figure, normally William Gladstone. And then the owner of the furniture would say, “Ooh.” The show was visiting a town near where Aunt Bridget lived, so she was going to take a chair for the experts to feel. Her friend, Hilary, was entering it too, and Bridget knew that she’d never hear the end of it if her chair got a lower valuation than Hilary’s chest of drawers. She was nervous about appearing on TV too, and on the day of the filming she had a few small glasses of brandy, which added up would have been one huge glass of brandy. Her grandchildren, Daisy and Graham, were going to appear on the show with her. They called around with their father, who was trying to get the chair into the back of the car. This was proving difficult because Bridget was directing the operation, and the brandy wasn’t improving her getting-an-antique-chair-in-a-car skills. There was an owl in Bridget’s garden who used to hide in a bucket. Daisy and Graham were looking at him as their father and grandmother tried to get the chair in the car. The owl stayed as still as possible in the bucket when the kids were around. Sometimes he moved his head around a bit. Daisy wanted to see the bird in flight, so she went to the kitchen and got some ham from the fridge. She hung a piece of string over a metal arch in the garden, and as she tied the ham to one end of the string she told Graham to tie the other end to something. With the piece of ham hanging in mid air, they stood back and waited. After a few minutes the owl raised his head, and when he saw the piece of ham he left the bucket and flew towards it. He caught the ham in mid air and flew away with it, pulling the piece of string behind him, which pulled the chair attached to the other end of the string. The chair was dragged across the concrete for a few yards, until the ham came out of the string. Daisy said to her brother, “Did you attach the other end of the string to the chair?” “No,” Graham said. The chair was badly scratched. Daisy felt the texture, and she had no idea who William Gladstone was, but she thought he’d probably throw out a chair that felt so rough. She said to her grandmother, “Is there something else you could take on the show instead of the chair?” “Hm?” Bridget said. The brandy was impairing her ability to understand the situation, and she had another glass before the show too. During the filming she smiled at the camera all the time, and the kids did all of the talking to the expert from the show. He said, “Now then, what have ye got to show us?” “It’s an owl hiding in a bucket,” Daisy said, and Graham said, “He thinks we can’t see him.” The expert reached down to feel the owl, but Daisy said, “You do know how sharp their beaks are?” He pulled his hand away and said, “I think this piece would be worth… a million euro if it was owned by Evel Knievel.” Everyone there said ‘ooh’ - a valuation on the assumption that Evel Knievel owned it had never been attempted before. Bridget didn’t really know what was going on, but when she heard the ‘ooh’s, she turned towards Hilary and smiled.

The moose’s head over the fireplace still looks confused after the clocks went forward. We used to have a clock on the opposite wall and we’d put it forward by a few minutes every day to ease the transition for him, but when he’d hear the nine o’ clock news on the TV at half-eight he’d be more confused than ever. We replaced the clock with a painting of a goose, but he spent most of his time glaring at the goose. We replaced that with a barometer, and that has eased the confusion a little bit.

Going to Bed.

The rain is back. The clocks will be going forward at the weekend - that’s an even more obvious sign of summer than the rain. I found a hedge clippers I’d lost last summer. It was embedded in a hedge. I asked the dog if he knew how it got there, but I probably did lose it myself. The dog would never admit to anything anyway.

My cousin Hector went to the pub for a few drinks with his brother, Albert, when Albert came to stay with them one weekend. Albert woke up in a wooden wheelbarrow in the garden on the following morning. The first thing he saw was a boy on a bike cycling around him. The boy would appear from one side, then disappear at the other, and come around again a few seconds later. This went on for about ten minutes, until Albert noticed an ice cream cone in the boy’s hand, and he was sure there wasn’t a cone there on the last circuit. Albert looked around him, and Hector’s neighbour was standing there with her daughter. The boy on the bike was her son. Albert asked how long they’d been there and she said, “I don’t know. About a quarter of an hour.” “Right. And what are ye doing there?” “Just looking at you in the wheelbarrow.” “Right… And what about the people in the minibus?” She turned around and noticed the minibus for the first time. It was carrying a group of Austrian tourists, on their way to visit a castle, but it was parked by the side of the road. Hector’s neighbour said to them, “What are ye doing there?” But the tourists just stared back. One of them took a photo of her. Hector had managed to make it all the way into the house on the previous night, but he fell asleep on an armchair. He was woken up by his daughters, Alice and Grace. They kept asking him questions about electricity but he wasn’t in the mood to answer. Whenever he needed a bit of peace, he got them to play a game he called ‘Slow Motion’. Basically, he’d just get them to move in slow motion. It seems to confuse the cat - he once fell over while they were playing it. Ever since then, Alice and Grace have been trying to make him fall over again, so when Hector saw the cat sitting on the wall in the garden he suggested that they play Slow Motion out there. They left him in peace at last. Normally when he needs a bit of peace, he needs a glass of whiskey just as much. When the girls are playing Slow Motion, he has to play along too, and it can be hell lifting the glass to his mouth so slowly. But a glass of whiskey was the last thing he needed then. He tried to go to sleep on the armchair, but he couldn’t stop thinking of the night before. He had a vague memory of meeting a polar bear, and the polar bear was talking about how people always complained when he wrote on blackboards because he scratched them with his claws, and he loved writing on blackboards. Albert, the neighbours and the tourists all stared at Alice and Grace when they came out of the front door and walked in slow motion through the garden. No one said a word. They seemed to be moving towards the cat on the wall. When they were a few yards away from the wall, their father came out and went to Albert in the wheelbarrow. He said, “Did I meet a polar bear last night who loved writing on blackboards, and he was upset because people didn’t want him writing on blackboards at all?” Albert didn’t say a word, then Hector looked around and saw the neighbours staring at him. So were Alice and Grace - they had stopped their slow motion walk towards the cat, and the cat was staring at him too. Then he noticed the minibus full of tourists staring at him and he wondered if this was a dream. That seemed to be the most likely explanation for it. He looked around and thought he saw a polar bear in the distance, running towards him. He screamed, but then he realised that it wasn’t a polar bear in the distance - it was their Labrador puppy up close. The puppy clung to Hector’s leg. He looked around him again, and the look of pity on his daughters’ faces was something he’d seen many times before. He knew he wasn’t dreaming then. There was a similar look on his brother’s face. The neighbours and the tourists seemed to be looking at him in a funny way too. There was an eerie silence, and Hector wondered how he’d get out of this. The puppy was staring up at him, wondering why he wasn’t doing anything. Then he noticed that the cat was lying on its side on the grass, with its paws sticking out. He pointed towards it and said, “The cat’s fallen over.” Alice and Grace completely forgot about their father then. They were cursing their luck for missing the fall. Albert fell out of the wheelbarrow as he tried to turn around to see the cat, and the girls missed that as well, but some of the tourists got pictures of it. Hector ran back towards the house, as fast as he could with a puppy stuck to his leg. But when he went back inside he saw the bar stool he’d stolen from the pub on the night before, so he chose to believe he was dreaming again. And then he went to bed.

The moose’s head over the fireplace looks happy again after all the horse racing of last week. He was wearing headphones for most of the time, but he suspected we were up to something. It’s easy to make him forget about these things and cheer him up - just have a staring competition with him. He loves winning, and he’s always likely to win too. You just have to stare at him for a few minutes, give up, and then he’s happy with himself. It was the wife’s niece who discovered this. She challenged him to a staring match, and she hates losing at anything, so she lasted three hours before giving up. The moose’s head was delighted after this. It’s also a great way of keeping the niece occupied. We tell her that the moose has been blinking all day to let her think she has a chance. That’ll give you a few hours peace.

Around the house.

I cleaned out some of the sheds at the back of the garden. Well, I took some stuff out and put it back in again in a slightly different order. It’s been years since I last did that. I cleaned the windows. It’s been years since I did that too, so the sheds are much brighter inside now. At least when they were dark they didn’t look as if they needed to be cleaned out inside.

My cousin June’s daughter, Daisy, has a friend called Stephanie, but everyone knows her by the nickname ‘Season’. She had been given the nickname ‘Sesame Street’ because she liked carrot cake so much. When she explained that to people they always said, “Oh right,” even though they had no idea why she’d be called ‘Sesame Street’ just for liking carrot cake, but they got the impression that they should know. Stephanie didn’t really know either. But the name Sesame Street only lasted for a year because her father thought that Stephanie Sesame Street was too long, so he decided ‘Season’ was short for it. Every spring, Season would talk about the leaves coming out on the trees and the flowers flowering, and then in Autumn she loved to walk over the leaves on the ground. Daisy wondered if the name ‘Season’ was making her more conscious of the seasons, so she started calling her brother, Graham, ‘Me’ to see if he’d become more conscious of her, Daisy. She tested it out by saying things like, “Hey Me, get me an apple.” But it didn’t really work. If anything, it only made him more conscious of himself, so she started calling him ‘You’, but that didn’t work either. There was too much room for confusion with ‘Me’ and ‘You’ so she started calling him ‘Paintbrush’, and he did become more conscious of paintbrushes. She used to leave paintbrushes around the house, and he’d throw them at things. When Daisy saw a programme about hot air balloons she wanted to go for a ride on one, so she started calling her brother ‘Phileas Fogg’. She knew it was a bit of a long shot, but it was worth trying, she thought. She observed her brother closely to see any effects of the name on his behaviour. She didn’t know how the name would affect him, apart from a vague idea that he’d somehow get her into a hot air balloon, but she thought she’d recognise the effects when she saw them, especially if it was something involving a hot air balloon. She only had to wait a few days to see the first sign of the name’s influence. Their aunt Rachel was going out with a man called Robert, who took her to a ball. He was wearing a top hat, and as soon as Graham saw him, he threw a paintbrush at the hat and knocked it off. Daisy felt that this was a result of the name’s influence, but actually he’d been waiting for an opportunity to throw something at a top hat for years. She called him ‘Fogg’ as often as possible, and she emphasised the name. “Look at what the dog is doing to the curtain, Fogg.” He just stared back at her. When Season called around one day she took no notice of the flowers in the garden or the birds singing in the trees. Daisy asked her what was wrong and she said, “My father wants me to go to a dog show and walk our dog around the ring because at the last show he called one of the judges a centipede.” Daisy said, “Don’t worry about that, Cruella. I can get you out of that one, Cruella.” Season just stared back at her, like Graham did when she called him ‘Fogg’. When June was having a party, the kids’ cousin Scott came over, and he played in the garden with Daisy, Graham and Season. Graham had a cake in his hand and the dog kept jumping up and down, trying to get it, so Graham threw it away and said ‘fetch’. The dog turned around and ran, but he didn’t see where the cake landed, so he just kept running. They were at the side of the house and they saw him disappear around the front, and a few seconds later he appeared again from around the back. He ran towards them and then kept on running around the front again. When he went past them, Daisy said to Season, “Look, he’s running away from you, Cruella.” The dog ran around the house again, and Daisy said the same thing to Season when he ran past them. He ran around five times, and Daisy said it every time. And then Scott said to Graham, “I bet you can’t run around the house faster than the dog.” Daisy said, “Yes, arounnnnd the house. He’s betting you that you can’t run around the house in eighty… arounnnnd the house.” They all just stared at her. So the next time the dog came around, Graham set off after him, and when he came to the front door he saw a possible short cut that he couldn’t resist. The door was open, so he ran into the hall, and he hoped that he’d be able to make it through the house without any serious obstructions. Robert was standing near a door, and when he saw Graham running towards the room he felt a need to be somewhere else. He hid behind the door, and he stood out again when Graham had run past, but unfortunately he stood right in the path of the dog, who had seen Graham take his shortcut and followed him into the house. The dog had to jump on the table to avoid running into Robert. He slid all the way across the table and onto the floor at the other side, taking the table cloth with him, along with all the plates with sandwiches and cakes, the cups and glasses. Rachel had been standing where the dog landed, but she jumped out of the way and hit a sideboard, which wobbled from side to side, and most of its contents fell on the floor. Daisy, Season and Scott ran inside when they heard the noise, and everyone in the house went to the room. Daisy stood near the table and as she looked at the destruction before her, a balloon floated gently to the ground at her feet. “I’m very, very sorry about all this,” she said.

The moose’s head over the fireplace hates horses, so it’s a bit awkward watching Chelthenam on the TV this week. But we’ve learnt from past years - we put blinkers on him to shield his eyes from the TV. You’d think this would only remind him of horses, but he doesn’t mind as long as you put headphones over his ears. He’ll be listening to David Bowie during the Gold Cup. He seemed slightly bewildered by Schoenberg during the Champion Hurdle. Today it’s Francoise Hardy for the Queen Mother.

Maths.

The cold spell is finally over. And it hasn’t been replaced by constant rain either, which is nice. I spent half an hour walking slowly around the edges of the garden, through trees, by red brick walls and fences, and I came across two different stray cats. I haven’t informed the dog of this yet. When I figure out how you’d go about informing a dog of something, I probably will let him know about the cats.

My cousin Gary once became a maths teacher when he was just trying to kill a spider with his shoe. He was invited to a party by a woman called Shelley, who was a friend of a friend, and Gary was very eager to make her more than just a friend of a friend, and more than a friend too. She was training to be a maths teacher, and when he got to her house he was introduced to her father, who was a maths teacher, her uncle, also a maths teacher, her grandfather, another two uncles, an aunt and five cousins who were all maths teachers. When he saw a spider on a statue in the back garden he took off his shoe to kill it, but Shelley’s father saw him and asked what he was doing. Gary realised that there was no real need to kill the spider and no need at all to take off his shoe to do something that there was no real need to do. He said, “I’m killing a spider,” in a very half-hearted way, and of course by then the spider was long gone. Shelley’s father seemed slightly suspicious when he asked Gary what he ‘did’. Gary was nervous, and it never crossed his mind to tell the truth - that he was a student. He just said the first thing that came into his head. “I’m a maths teacher.” Normally the first thing that comes into Gary’s head lands him in trouble if it makes it as far as his mouth, but Shelley’s father was delighted with this. And Shelley herself seemed even happier a few minutes later when she went up to him and said, “You never told me you were a maths teacher.” He said he must have just forgotten to tell her, and then he mentioned that it was a bit of a coincidence, him being a maths teacher and her about to be one, but she said, “No. I’m never going to be a maths teacher. At least I hope I’m not. I never wanted to be one and I dropped out of teacher training college a few months ago, but I haven’t figured out how to tell my father yet, or anyone in the family. This is what I wanted to talk to you about. My uncle asked me to teach a few maths classes at a summer school he’s running. I’ve been looking for someone to take my place. Will you do it for me?” Gary could see no good reason why a maths teacher would refuse to teach two maths classes for a girl he’s trying to impress, so he said he’d love to do it. Then he spotted the flaw in his reasoning: he’s not a maths teacher. At least it was just two classes, he told himself. And the kids were all about ten years old. He thought he’d surely survive two classes as a maths teacher to ten-year-olds, as long as he stayed well away from anything to do with maths. So when he stood in front of his students for the first time he said to them, “Why don’t we get the ball rolling with some questions. Does anyone have any questions? About anything at all. It doesn’t have to be about maths. Just think of a question about anything. Actually, why don’t we ease ourselves into the maths by starting with a question that has nothing to do with maths.” A boy put his hand up and said, “Do birds have toes?” That was nowhere near mathematics, so Gary was delighted. He said, “Yes, they have,” but then the boy said, “How many toes do they have?” This was veering towards maths, so Gary tried to steer it back towards birds. He said, “Nine. The thing to remember about birds is that they… the birds you see in the trees, they… they like to fly around fields where… like if you’re having a picnic…” Gary didn’t know anything about birds, but he felt on safer ground here than with the maths, so he rambled on about birds for five minutes until a girl put up her hand and said, “Do they have five toes on one foot and four on the other?” Gary had landed right back in the middle of maths again. He said, “They have four on each foot and one on their… back. Now as I was saying about the bird trapped in a telephone booth, if you leave them there for long enough, they will figure out how to lift the receiver…” The girl put up her hand again and said, “Why do they have one on their back?” “To stop predators from… eating their back.” The questions about birds continued until someone asked who’d win in a fight between a bird and a badger in a tree. Gary said the badger would win every time, but some of the class disagreed. They said that the bird would be much more used to moving about in the tree, and the badger would have trouble even getting into the tree. Gary said that these things didn’t matter because there was such a difference in size that the bird wouldn’t have a hope of defeating a badger, and some of the class agreed with him on this. They spent half an hour arguing about it, but they couldn’t reach an agreement, and then Gary asked the group who were backing the bird if they’d ever seen a badger before and none of them had, so he said he’d bring in Uncle Harry’s stuffed badger on the following day and then they’d see how big these things are. There were just a few minutes left in the class, and Gary asked them if they had any more questions. When a boy put up his hand and asked a question about maths, Gary shook his head and said to himself, “There’s always one.” As he tried to think of an answer, he wondered why he should bother keeping up the pretence of being a maths teacher. He’d have to tell Shelley the truth sooner or later, and he had no idea how he’d go about explaining that one to her, especially after taking these maths classes. So he came clean to the kids and he told them his problem with explaining things to Shelley. The kids tried to help him out, and they proved to be very helpful, or at least the ones who supported his position on the badger were. The others didn’t care a whole lot, but a girl in the badger group came up with a great idea: “I saw this film once and there was a man who had a friend whose sister died and before she died she was trying to set up a business selling… sea shells I think it was, but then she died, so her sister, the friend of this man in the film, decided to set up that business and the man in the film gave up his job to help her.” Gary had figured out what she was getting at before she said, “So that’s what you should say to this woman - that you’re giving up teaching to help the a friend whose sister died.” She recommended coming up with something other than the sea shells, and that sounded like good advice to Gary. And then he saw another feature of the plan that the girl didn’t spot at all: he could use this story on Shelley and tell her that she could use the story on her father. That’s what he did. He told her that he was giving up teaching to help a friend set up a book shop to fulfil her dead sister’s wishes, and to do this he had to study English in college for a few years. She was delighted when he suggested that she use a similar story on her father. She kissed Gary on the cheek and rushed off to tell her father straightaway. Gary went to Uncle Harry’s place to get the stuffed badger, and Harry had a tiny stuffed robin as well. Gary brought them both into class the next day and he spent twenty minutes enacting fights between them, and the idea of the robin winning seemed ridiculous because of the difference in size. The pupils who had taken the ‘badger’ side of the argument had a great time watching these mock fights, but the ‘robin’ side were very unimpressed. The fights came to an end when Shelley’s father came into the class. He said to Gary, “I was talking to Shelley last night. She told me she’s not going to be a maths teacher because she wants to help a friend set up a shoe shop in accordance with a her friend’s dead sister’s wishes. When I asked her if she’d miss the other maths teachers, like her friend Gary, she told me that you aren’t a maths teacher at all.” Gary said, “Well I never said I was a maths teacher.” “What are you then?” “I’m… I study birds.” “An ornithologist?” “No, I study birds.” “Then why are you teaching this maths class?” “It’s not a maths class. It’s a… bird class.” Gary held up the stuffed robin. Shelley’s father turned to a boy in the front row and asked what he had learnt about birds. Thankfully it was one of the ‘badger’ group, and he was only too happy to help Gary out. He talked about why birds have a toe on their backs and fighting with badgers and so on, but as he spoke, Gary noticed that the ‘robin’ group were all smiling. He had a feeling that they were looking forward to landing him in trouble, so as Shelley’s father listened to the boy in the front row, Gary wrote on the blackboard: ‘If ye help me out, I’ll buy ye DVDs’. The whole class was smiling then. They told Shelley’s father everything they knew about birds, which turned out to be a lot more than Gary knew. For instance, he had no idea that some birds sleep in old shoes or empty paint cans. If Gary had been any good at maths he’d have worked out how much thirty DVDs would cost and he’d never have agreed to buy them. He had to get a bank loan to pay for them.

The moose’s head over the fireplace looks very happy when you put a scarf around his neck. The wife first discovered this when I gave her a scarf for her birthday and she put it around the moose’s neck. It’s almost as if he thinks the scarf hides the fact that he doesn’t have a body. I hope he never sees himself in a mirror while he’s wearing it.

Well done, Holmes.

This cold spell has been going on for a bit too long. If it was January, I could understand it, but I’ve checked the calendar and it hasn’t been January for weeks now. The plants and animals don’t have a calendar, so they must be really confused. I hope they are. I don’t like the idea of being less able to understand these things than a plant.

My cousin Jane once put on her uncle’s hat, which was just like the one Sherlock Holmes used to wear, and she said to her brother, “Where were you on the night of the twenty-fifth after Lord Ascot’s ball?” He said, “I didn’t mean to break the garden gnome.” But she was too caught up in the whole Sherlock Holmes thing to notice what he said. She said, “Now, my dear Watson, bring me my… shotgun. I have some… inquiries to make.” Tommy didn’t know how to go about bringing her a shotgun, so he just sat there, but she didn’t seem to notice his inactivity. She went out to the back garden, probably to make inquiries. It was then that she noticed the garden gnome with the broken hat. He was still smiling, but he wouldn’t be smiling when it rains and he fills up with rain water. Jane had a feeling that she should know something about this, and she wondered if this was the way Sherlock Holmes solved his cases. He’d see the crime scene and straightaway he’d have an intuition about the case, and he’d work from there. She was fairly sure she had an intuition about something, but that didn’t tell her where to go next. She kept the Sherlock Holmes hat on her head as she thought about the crime. Three hours later, when she was standing in a field with her friend, Claudia, and her brother, she was still thinking about it and she was still wearing the hat, but she eventually took it off because of the heat, and it wasn’t helping very much anyway. Tommy had just found an old bike in the shed. Claudia sat on the bike and started rolling down the slope in the field, and when she tried to use the brakes she was sorry she hadn’t tried to use the brakes before she set off. They had no effect at all, although she wasn’t going too fast because of the grass. Jane ran after her, but she couldn’t catch up. She told Claudia to fall off the bike, but she wouldn’t. Jane insisted that she’d have a soft landing on the grass, but still Claudia went on and on, so Jane put on the Sherlock Holmes hat and said, “Fall off the bike.” Claudia fell off then, and she did have a soft landing, but she said to Jane, “If I had turned to the side, I would have stopped.” “Well maybe that’s why you’re not Sherlock Holmes.” “You’re not Sherlock Holmes either if you didn’t think of that.” “I’m not the one who set off down a hill on a bike with no brakes. That would make you Watson and me Sherlock Holmes.” “Well if you’re Sherlock Holmes, why haven’t you figured out who broke the garden gnome?” “I have a fair idea. Obviously Moriarty was involved in some way.” “And who’s Moriarty?” “That’s what I have to figure out.” “In other words you don’t have a clue.” “I have an intuition about who it is. I have a clue alright, but it would go way over your head, Watson.” Jane didn’t notice her brother backing away when Moriarty was mentioned. He thought that his sister would surely remember his confession if she kept thinking about it, so he decided the best thing to do would be to buy another garden gnome and hope she forgets about it. He went to a garden centre where they sold the gnomes, but when he got there he saw a garden gnome with a Sherlock Holmes hat on his head and a pipe in his mouth, and he couldn’t resist getting it. Jane and Claudia spent the rest of the afternoon arguing about Holmes and Watson. Jane said things like, “Don’t walk into that wall, Watson.” They played tennis and every time Claudia hit a ball out or into the net, Jane would say, “My poor Watson.” When Jane was eating crisps she offered some to Claudia, but Claudia said that Sherlock Holmes would never eat crisps, and they spent an hour arguing about whether or not he would. When they went back to the garden and saw the garden gnome with the pipe and the hat, Claudia said, “He looks much more like Sherlock Holmes than you do. And he looks as if he’s solved the crime.” Jane pointed to a gnome with a fishing rod held over the grass and said, “Yeah, well that’s the real Watson. You’re not intelligent enough to be him and he’s fishing in the grass.” Claudia said, “I suppose that one’s Moriarty.” She pointed to a gnome with a patch over his eye. Tommy had added the eye patch because he thought it made the gnome look menacing. “Well everything seems to be sorted out then,” Jane said, and Claudia said, “Are you saying that this garden gnome broke the hat on the other one?” “Of course not, my poor Watson.” “Then how was the hat broken?” Just as Jane was trying to think of what to say, the dog ran over to the Sherlock Holmes garden gnome and tried to bite his hat off. Jane just pointed to it and said, “Elementary, my dear Watson.” Claudia had a feeling that there was something significant about the fact that the dog was trying to bite the head off Sherlock Holmes, but she couldn’t quite comprehend it. She knew that if she admitted her inability to understand the situation, Jane would say, “My poor Watson,” so she just said, “Well done, Holmes.”

The moose’s head over the fireplace looks very happy now, but he didn’t look like that in a photo of myself and some of the relatives standing in front of the fireplace. He was in the background and he deliberately tried to look sad while the photo was being taken. He looked so sad that the wife’s mother asked me what I’d done to him to make him sad. I don’t know how best to answer a question like that. I told the mother-in-law that he’d probably been drinking but I know that’s not the best answer. She looked angry and the moose’s head looked over the moon.