Gravy

Summer's here at last, or nearly here. The rain has stopped anyway. We just need the wind to die down and the clouds to clear and we're in business.

My cousin Jane sometimes pretends to play the banjo by singing words that end in 'ing' in a really annoying voice. She tends to do that when she's had too much coffee. She hangs the clothes on the line very, very slowly when she's had too little, or none at all. She once called her Budgie 'Gravy' when she had too much coffee. His real name is 'Coffee', but he seemed to like 'Gravy', so the name stuck.

When she's had too much brandy she stands next to Gravy's cage and says, "I'm only going to say this once, so listen very carefully..." She makes perfect sense then, or she would do if she finished her sentences. It makes no difference to Gravy, although he does listen very carefully.

There was only one occasion when she had too much gravy, and then she pointed at a dog and said, "He's like... I don't know. What's wrong with him?" That just happened once. And then she said, "Y' see, the reason I did that was..." If she'd finished that sentence she'd have said 'because I had too much gravy'. She had too much brandy too.

Her best friend, Claudia, wrote a play called 'I am not a Basketball'. The final line was 'no one ever said you were', and it was supposed to be delivered by Jane, but she got her timing wrong and she said it ten seconds into the first scene, completely ruining the effect of the play.

"I've been drinking milk," she said afterwards. "Much too much milk."

The failure of the play caused a rift in her frienship with Claudia. They didn't talk for weeks, until some friends of theirs arranged for them to 'accidentally' meet each other outside a shop.

Jane didn't know what to say. The only thing she could think of saying was 'I've got this blue pen', but that didn't seem like enough, so she said it with loads of 'n's.

"I've got this blue pennnnnnnnnnnnnnn."

She thought of something else to say during the 'n's:

"You can have it, if you want. You could write another play with it. The basketball play would have been brilliant if I hadn't messed it up."

"Thanks," Claudia said. "I was thinking of writing a play about these shepherds who..."

Jane started laughing. She tends to do that when she's been out in the sun for too long.

The moose's head over the fireplace looks a bit like Einstein when you look at him through half-closed eyes and think of Einstein. It works with Bette Davis too. He likes to think he looks like Bjorn Borg, and there's no harm in letting him think that anyway.

Video Killed the Argument Tent

I can't remember a May that's been as wet as this. Not that I go about the place remembering how wet Mays are. The grass is growing very quickly, but it's too wet to cut it. The rain didn't matter to Munster, who won the Heineken Cup under a roof in Cardiff. Arsenal could easily blame the rain for their loss in the Champions League final, but they're sticking to their approach of pinning the blame on the ref.

My cousin June got all the family together in a restaurant one evening to celebrate her mother's birthday. Before the dessert arrived, June's kids,
Daisy and Graham, went to look at the fish in a fish tank. There was a small plastic canoe in the tank, with a small plastic canoeist in that, but the canoe and the little plastic man were upside-down. One of the goldfish turned upside-down to look at the canoeist, and then he swam away to the other end of the tank. When he came back to the canoe, he turned upside-down again.

When Daisy and Graham got home, they turned lots of things upside-down, just to see what they looked like. The mugs weren't very interesting upside-down, but they were more than very interesting when Daisy and Graham turned their heads around to look at the mugs the right way up while everything else was upside down.

They turned a bucket upside down for their pet duck, Sleepy, to look at. They were hoping he'd try to turn his head around, but he just fell asleep.

They turned the patio table and chairs upside down, which was good. They stuck the handle of a shovel into the ground, with the metal end pointing up, but they both agreed that that was a waste of time.

They held clipboards as they examined upside-down garden gnomes.

"I just drew a cloud on mine," Graham said as he showed Daisy his clipboard.

"I knew you would. That's why I drew a plane on mine... Your cloud looks more like a fire engine with little elves on it, and the elves have claws."

He turned it upside down. "Now it's a cloud."

They stood on top of a tall building. "What does this have to do with anything?" Daisy said.

"Do you think I know?"

They went to see a tree that fell over in a storm. Daisy checked the weather forecast in the newspaper before they went -- it said it was going to rain, so they wore their rain coats.

The forecast was right about the rain. They didn't mind that, but the tree turned out to be a disappointment.

"If you look at it sideways," Graham said, "it looks a bit like the rabbits when they're wet, both of them together."

"Yeah... But you might as well just look at the rabbits."

"I know. Was there anything else in the paper?"

"Oh yeah, there's an ad here for Uncle Ronan's folk festival."

Ronan was setting up a folk festival with some friends of his, Joe and Primrose. It was meant to be just a small event on a Saturday in July, but it grew into a weekend music festival. They saw the chance to make a nice profit from it, but costs were rising too. When they started planning it, they never thought they'd need security. They wouldn't have needed security if the festival was just the few people in a field they initially thought it would be, but thousands of people were expected to attend. Hiring security guards would really eat into their profits.

Ronan came up with the idea of an argument tent, a place where people could go to argue and let all of the aggravation out of their systems. He said, "Do we want them hammering the crap out of each other in a field, or arguing about crisps in a tent?"

"Wouldn't they just hammer the crap out of each other in a tent?" Joe said.

"You wouldn't see them in a tent."

So they set up the argument tent. It was big enough to hold about fifty people. Any more than that would have aggravated those people even further. They put a few TVs around the tent, and they planned to play a video of something relaxing.

Primrose had a pet trout called Greg. Ronan and Joe thought it was just an imaginary friend, especially when she said that Greg didn't like Angelina Jolie, but there really was a trout called Greg in the pond behind Primrose's house. He might not have known he was called Greg, or that Angelina Jolie was Angelina Jolie, and he might not have known he was a trout either, but he was definitely there.

Joe had a video of fish swimming in a tank, and Ronan suggested they play it on the TVs in the argument tent, because it's just the sort of thing that would relax people who are there for an argument, but the real reason they wanted to play it was to see what this would do to Primrose's mind.

They took her into the tent and showed her the TVs with the fish. They watched the screens as the fish swam back and forth. "Talking to Greg is more relaxing than this," she said.

After a few minutes of this, the fish disappeared from the screens and they were replaced by rowers competing in a race.

"I meant to tape the football," Joe said, "but I taped that by mistake, and I used the wrong tape too."

"Some rowers used to practise in the pond behind my house," Primrose said. "They were banned from the lake. For spitting, I think. But it only took them a few seconds to get from one side of the pond to the other. Even Greg thought it was a bit odd."

Ronan and Joe thought it was a bit odd too. They didn't think the rowers were real because they didn't think Greg was real, and how could an unreal trout think that real rowers were odd.

"Maybe we've implanted the idea of the rowers in her mind," Ronan said.

"Wow. I've always wanted to be able to do that with women. Not to be able to make them think of rowers, but to be able to make them think of me, and see me as a sort of a muscle-bound rower."

"I wonder what else we could implant in her mind."

"I have a tape of mud-wrestling."

"I don't know about that," Ronan said. He did know about that.

"I'll bring the tape tomorrow."

"I don't know." That was a yes.

Later that day, June brought Daisy and Graham to see the site of the festival. Primrose showed them around, and the tape of the rowers was still playing in the argument tent. She told them about Greg, and the rowers in the pond.

"Did they ever turn upside down?" Graham said.

"I think they did once. But they couldn't go completely upside down because the pond was too shallow. They just got a lot of mud on their heads."

"Did Greg try to turn upside down to see them?" Daisy said.

"Maybe. I don't know. He wouldn't have turned completely upside down anyway, because they didn't either."

Primrose took them to see Greg. Daisy and Graham brought Sleepy with them, and he swam around the pond. Primrose had a small model of one of Christopher Columbus's ships. "There's Christopher Columbus on the front. Greg likes him."

She turned the ship upside down. "He's not going to discover anything like that," Graham said.

Greg did turn around a few times to look at Mr. Columbus. Primrose filmed all this, and she played the tape in the argument tent on the following morning.

"There's Sleepy discovering Christopher Columbus," she said as the duck swam into the shot. "Well done."

"You'd think it'd be more exciting," Joe said.

"Y' know," Primrose said, "I just thought of something. You could pronounce 'rowers' as 'rowers', as in having a row. And that's really what we want people to do in here, not relax. They need to let it all out."

"I have just the thing," Joe said. He played the mud-wrestling video.

"Or maybe we do want them to relax," Primrose said. "I mean, we really don't want them to copy that at a folk festival. Why don't we just play the video of Greg, Sleepy and Christopher Columbus instead."

After Primrose left the tent, Ronan said to Joe, "I planted that idea in her mind."

"About the rowers?" Joe said.

"No, about the argument tent."

"You didn't plant it in her mind. You just told her about it."

"Same thing."

"It's not the same thing."

"And all that other stuff with the duck and Christopher Columbus -- I implanted all that in her mind too."

"You're full of crap," Joe said. "Who implanted all that crap in your mind? God?"

Ronan thought that the only response to that was to implant something in Joe's mind, so he made a few alterations to the argument tent.

The festival was starting on the following day. June brought the kids there in the morning. There was something very odd about the argument tent, but the kids loved it, because almost everything in it was upside-down.

The upside-down TVs were playing a Kylie Minogue video -- 'I Can't Get You Out of My Head'. There was also an inflatable kangaroo, a toy koala, a hat with corks hanging from pieces of string and lots of beer cans. All of these things were upside-down. There was a model of a ship with a tiny plastic man on it. He looked like Christopher Columbs, but a sign said it was Captain Cook.

Joe looked around the tent with them, and Ronan kept asking him questions, like what do you think of kangaroos, or have you ever seen a boomerang.

Joe didn't think much about kangaroos and he'd never seen a boomerang. After ten minutes of these questions and answers, Joe finally said what Ronan had been waiting to hear: "I'm not really interested in Australia."

"Aha!" Ronan said. "I just planted the idea of Australia in your mind."

"You didn't."

"Australia is in your mind. I put it there. Woooo." Ronan held up his hands and moved his fingers about as he said 'woooo'.

"That's like saying that quacking implants the idea of a duck in my mind."

"Yeah. It's scary, isn't it."

"You're an idiot."

"If I'm an idiot, and I can control your mind, what does that make you? And whatever you answer, I made you say it."

Joe's response was to push Ronan, and Ronan pushed him back. The pushing took about half a second to descend into violence. The fight made its way out of the tent and into the mud outside, before Primrose managed to restore peace.

"I think we'll just drop the argument tent," she said when things had calmed down. "It was a very good idea, but I think we'll just drop the argument tent."

It became an upside-down tent instead. This was Daisy and Graham's idea. The tent itself wasn't upside-down (Graham put a lot of thought into it, and in the end he had the concede that the tent itself would have to remain upright) but everything inside the tent was upside-down. It proved to be one of the most popular features of the folk festival.

The moose's head over the fireplace loves to watch paper planes flying by. So do I. They're so unpredictable. You aim for one place and they end up to the west of your intended destination, and then you have to get a bus to go to the place you wanted to go to. The surprised looking hen in the painting seems to like Knight Rider. That came as a surprise to us all.

Galway

It's great to have the long days again. Daylight is staying around long into what used to be night. The Champions League final is on this evening. It's Arsenal against Barcelona, two of the most entertaining teams in Europe, so that should be much more interesting than what the sky is doing, hopefully. You never know with European finals. Last year's final was the best thing the TV ever did, but Marseille against Red Star Belgrade in 1991 was like watching twenty-two men in a field.

My cousin Gary was once running down the street with his friends, Shelley and Andy. They stopped to get their breaths back.

"Are we in Galway yet?" Gary said.

Shelley said, "If we weren't in Galway five minutes ago, we're not in Galway now."

When Gary woke up on the following morning, there was a woman in a long white dress standing at the end of the bed, looking down on him. She had blue eyes and long blond hair.

"Where am I?" he said.

"You're in Galway."

"Ah. That makes sense... And who are you?"

"I'm Cynthia. Do you not remember the phone booth?"

"I can remember a phone booth."

"Well let me show you the phone booth."

She took him through the streets, towards the edge of the city. She told him about how she was in love with a man in a band called 'The Knitting Newsels'. "They did a song called 'Fighting Pigeons'," she said. "If it's even half true they could get into a lot of trouble."

Over the previous few weeks, the band had been spending most of their time standing still and smoking cigarettes. They forgot they were a band, and they thought they were thieves instead. People pointed out that even thieves don't just stand around smoking.

They had been like this ever since they all changed their names to either Smith or Jones. None of them could remember which one they were, and they started wearing similar clothes too. One of the band taped a plastic fork to his finger. He had to hold up his hand a lot so he didn't accidentally hurt himself.

She wasn't sure which one she was supposed to be in love with. She knew it wasn't the one with the plastic fork on his finger. She'd narrowed it down to one of two. Her heart went for one, but her head went for the other.

"You've got to go with your heart," Gary said.

"I don't know. I'm fairly sure he's not the one I used to be in love with."

"You still have to go with your heart. The one you used to be in love with is probably confused himself, if he can't remember his own name."

"Maybe."

"Call him."

"I don't know."

The phone booth was in the middle of a field that was full of rocks, bricks from old buildings and the odd patch of grass. She showed him where he wrote his name on the glass of the phone booth. "I can't remember spelling my name with a 'fffff' before," he said.

He convinced her to phone the man in the band, the one her heart wanted her to phone. She was happy after calling him and asking if he'd like to go with her to the theatre.

Gary looked into the west. He could see as far as the horizon. "This is the sort of thing I expected to see in Galway," he said.

She didn't respond because she was eating a sweet.

"Where did you get that sweet?" Gary said.

She pointed at her mouth to indicate that she couldn't talk until she finished the sweet.

Shelley was in a cafe with a man called Neil, who was wearing a white suit. He stood at a jukebox. "I can't find Canada," he said.

Shelley explained the concept of a jukebox to him, and he chose a song by a singer called Lingel Bray, who only appears in public as a piece of cotton wool. His latest single was a song about wanting to go back to his hometown, Van Somethingsberg, because he'd been away too long. It sounded completely heartfelt, but people wondered why he couldn't remember the name if it's his own hometown. He wasn't sure what country it was in either, but he was fairly sure he was Irish.

His bad memory seemed more believable ever since The Knitting Newsels couldn't remember their names, and they just had to remember either Smith or Jones. The fact that people saw him as a piece of cotton wool (normally against a pale blue background) made the lack of memory seem more believable too.

"We met Lingel," Neil said, "myself, Cynthia and Ivan. Ivan kept singing that song as 'Van Halensberg and playing Van Halen songs. We were going to send Lingel a 'good luck' card when he launched his album, but we couldn't agree on the wording. Ivan wanted to include the word 'hellway', and he wanted to mention Van Halensberg too. It's typical. We hardly ever get anything done because of these disagreements, or because of Ivan putting plastic spiders into apples."

Andy was with Ivan, who was dressed in black. They were walking down a long red corridor. On the walls, there were paintings of people with huge eyes.

"People think what I do is all about putting plastic spiders into apples," Ivan said, "but nothing could be further from the truth."

"Why do they think that?"

"Because that's what I tell them when they ask me."

"Right. What do you do?"

"I put plastic spiders into apples." He winked a few times.

He was a long way from the truth when he said 'nothing could be further from the truth'. This is the conclusion Andy came to when he saw Ivan putting plastic spiders into apples, and then putting the apples into a box with 'good apples' written on it. As he did this, he sang a song about putting plastic spiders into apples.

Shelley and Neil left the cafe. They walked down a street, and looked through the black iron railings into a small park, where the grass hadn't been cut for about a month. They saw a man dressed as a Mountie. He was standing next to a woman holding a small Canadian flag.

"Is that what you were looking for earlier?" Shelley said.

"Maybe. But I'd have preferred to have found it on the jukebox."

They walked on, towards the edge of the city where Gary and Cynthia were. On the way, Shelley spoke about the benefits of co-operation, and how they'd never get anything done until they put their differences aside for the sake of getting things done.

Andy and Ivan were on their way to the phone booth too. They stopped in a pub for a drink. Andy put a coin in the jukebox and selected Belgium, but nothing happened. He listened carefully and looked around. Then he started smelling the air.

He kept smelling the air until he met Gary, Shelley, Neil and Cynthia near the phone booth at the edge of the city. Cynthia finished the sweet and said, "A car salesman gave it to me. He didn't want it."

Shelley told them about the benefits of co-operation, and Gary agreed with her.

"It smells more like Germany to me," Andy said.

Gary said, "It smells like Galway."

"If we weren't in Galway yesterday," Shelley said, "and we weren't in Galway the day before that, and we weren't in Galway the day before that..."

"We were in Galway the day before that," Gary said. "And we're in Galway now."

She looked confused. "What are we doing in Galway?"

"We're... Oh God!" He remembered why they were running away. They had come across a group of performance artists called The Thursdaves, but their performance was really just stealing carpets. A few days ago, Gary, Shelley and Andy prevented them from stealing a carpet by standing on it. The Thursdaves promised revenge.

"They're in Galway now too," Gary said when he saw the van approaching.

Himself, Shelley and Andy ran away. Cynthia and Neil didn't notice because they were thinking about what Shelley said, about the need to co-operate. Ivan just didn't care.

When Cynthia noticed that Gary and co were gone she said, "Where did they go?"

"They were chased away by people in a van," Ivan said.

"Right," she said, "we've got to help them, and this time we just have to co-operate."

They split up in their search. Cynthia found Gary, Shelley and Andy standing outside the locked entrance to an abandoned building. They were surrounded by The Thursdaves. The leader of the group was saying, "This is a very auspicious day, a very, very auspicious day. For us, not for ye. It's a very, very inauspicious day for the three of ye. Oh yes. Very auspicious for us. But for ye, when ye look back on this day, if ye look back on this day..."

Cynthia went over to him and said, "Would you like a sweet?"

"Thanks." He started eating the sweet, and he pointed at his mouth to indicate that he couldn't continue his speech until he finished the sweet.

Cynthia phoned The Knitting Newsels and said, "Listen, ye are thieves. Okay?"

"Yeah. I mean, we knew that."

"Good. I need ye to do a job of me. It's stealing something, so it should be exactly the sort of thing ye're used to doing."

The leader of The Thursdaves was still eating the sweet when the band arrived. The one with the plastic fork on his finger distracted The Thursdaves while his band-mates stole the van. He just stood there trying to think of a way to distract them, with his non-fork index finger on his chin. He poked them with the fork if they started to turn around, and said, "Hey, don't turn around."

They all turned around when they heard the engine of their van starting up. They watched the band speed away in the van, and there was nothing they could do, until Ivan arrived in another van. "I didn't steal this," he said, and winked a few times. "Get in the back, and we'll catch them."

The Thursdaves got in the back of the van. Neil locked the door. Ivan turned off the engine and got out. He handed the keys to the Mountie, who arrested the occupants of the van. He sang 'Van Somethingsberg' as 'Van Halensberg', and a woman next to him waved a small Canadian flag. Ivan's laugh was almost maniacal. He paid the Mountie to sing it like that.

They went to a pub to celebrate. Andy selected 'Van Somethingsberg' on the jukebox. When he heard the music he took a deep breath to smell the air. "Hmm, Canada," he said.

Ivan wondered if this was what he was trying to achieve. He thought about it for a while, and he didn't really know, but he laughed anyway.

He didn't laugh at all when Cynthia made a toast to co-operation, and to all the things they'd get done in the future. He knew she wasn't thinking about Van Halen.

The moose's head over the fireplace is a Liverpool fan (he doesn't have much choice in that), so there won't be any scarves to support Arsenal this evening, but he wouldn't mind if Arsenal won anyway, because they're not United or Chelsea. There will be scarves to support Munster in the rugby on Saturday. Not only are they Munster, but they're not Leinster too, which is almost as important as being Munster.

Meeting Goldie Hawn

All the insects are returning to the garden. The leaves are starting to appear on the trees. People with long hair are dancing barefoot on the lawn to the sound of folk music. I must do something about that. I asked in the garden centre if they had something to get rid of them, but they said I should ask in the pharmacy.

My cousin Hugh once went to a lecture about carpets with a friend of his called Mark. Neither of them had an interest in carpets, but they thought Goldie Hawn would be speaking at the lecture.

She never showed up, which was very disappointing for Hugh and Mark. The lecture itself didn't cheer them up. After they left the lecture hall, Mark said, "I know someone who looks a bit like Goldie Hawn. We could go to see her."

"We might as well."

"And she looks like Goldie Hawn looked thirty years ago."

"That sounds even better than the real Goldie Hawn."

So they went to see her. Her name was Imelda, and she lived in a small cottage out in the country. They met her in her front garden.

She looked very like a young Goldie Hawn. Hugh and Mark stood there, in silence, just looking at her and smiling. She smiled back at them. After about a minute of this, she started to laugh, and then they started laughing too. The three of them spent another few minutes just laughing for no apparent reason.

The laughter came to a sudden end when her boyfriend, Trevor, came out of the house and said, "What are ye laughing at?"

"Nothing," Mark said.

"What's going on here?" Trevor said, obviously not believing that they were lauging at nothing.

Hugh said, "We just came to look at..." He stopped when he noticed the menacing stare on Trevor's face, and he also took note of the fact that the face was about a foot above the top of his own head. Trevor wouldn't have had any reason to laugh if he found out that they came to look at his girlfriend.

Hugh eventually said that they just came to look at the garden, which wasn't much of an excuse anyway, and the best possible excuse wouldn't have sounded like much after the long pause in the middle of what Hugh said.

The menacing stare became even more menacing. Hugh and Mark turned around and walked away as quickly as they could without looking as if they were running away, which they were.

Their pace slowed as they walked down the hill, on a narrow, winding road. No cars passed by. It was a beautiful summer day. They listened to the sound of the birds and tried to remember Imelda's face. And forget Trevor's.

As they were walking past an old house they saw a friend of theirs, Quinny, in the garden. He told them it was his Aunt Flo's house, and he was supposed to be working on the garden, but he was spending most of his time looking for his blue suede shoes. He took them off so they wouldn't get dirty, but they kept going missing.

His uncle had a fear of lead pipes. He kept finding them in unexpected places, like birthday presents or in his shoes, so he put them in expected places, like the shed or on the area of ground where he spent a lot of time staring at.

He associated the pipes with blue things because one of the pipes was painted blue, and he developed a habit of putting blue things in expected places too. Quinny often found his shoes in the hedge, or in other places his uncle liked to look at.

To make sure he didn't lose them again, he tied them to a nineteenth century card table, but he lost the table.

He had been looking outdoors, in the places he found the shoes before, but Hugh pointed out that he should be looking indoors, in the places the table would be.

They found the table in his aunt's study. "I'm going to tie these to the gate," Quinny said as he left with the shoes. Hugh and Mark were alone in the room.

They heard the voice of Quinny's aunt, Flo, and wondered how they'd explain their presence in the room. They never wondered who she was talking to until they heard Trevor's voice. They didn't bother wondering how to explain the situation to him because when they last met, running away had proven to be much more effective than explaining things.

But it sounded as if Flo and Trevor were just outside the door, so the only other option was to hide. They hid behind a sofa just as Trevor and the aunt came into the room.

Trevor was there to install new lights, and Flo was showing him where to put them.

It seemed to take forever for her to explain this to Trevor. When she finished, he said, "I'll start in the room upstairs."

"Wherever you want," she said.

Hugh and Mark could hear Trevor leaving the room, and Mark breathed a sigh of relief, which was loud enough for Flo to hear.

She looked behind the sofa and said, "What are ye doing down there?"

"We're from a carpet magazine," Mark said. "We're international experts on carpets. We're just admiring your... carpet."

Mark didn't remember much of the carpet lecture, but it was enough to fool Flo. She showed them carpets all around the house, and they completely forgot about Trevor until they were just about to go into the room where he was working, and they heard him swearing at his pliers.

They were saved by the phone. Flo had to go downstairs to answer it. They hid in a cupboard on the landing when Trevor came out of the room.

They remained there in silence for a few minutes, until Mark said there was something furry on his hand.

They heard footsteps approaching the cupboard. They wondered how they'd explain this to Trevor, or to Flo. It seemed unlikely that there'd be any carpet in the cupboard.

But it was Imelda who opened the cupboard. Hugh whispered, "We're hiding."

"Why are ye hiding?" she whispered as she joined them inside, closing the doors behind her.

Hugh didn't know how to answer that one, but with Imelda he wasn't faced with the prospect of imminent violence if he failed to come up with a satisfactory explanation for his actions, so he just said, "Because we are."

The three of them remained completely silent for a few minutes, until Imelda started laughing. They tried to keep her quiet, but she only laughed louder.

Trevor opened the doors of the cupboard. "I knew ye were up to something," he said.

Hugh could see why it must look as if they were up to something, and whatever it was it had something to do with Imelda. There was no satisfactory explanation for being in a cupboard with her, and to avoid the imminent violence, Hugh decided to run.

Mark got the same idea at the same time. They ran out of the cupboard at either side of Trevor and he missed them both.

They ran down a small stairs at the back of the house, and down a dark corridor. They didn't know where they were going, but wherever it was, they decided they needed to get there even quicker when they heard Flo shout, "They're thieves! They stole my card table!"

They managed to find their way into the back garden. There were plenty of places to hide there. It was a huge garden with lots of trees and hedges, even a maze. They stopped running when they were sure they weren't being followed.

They stopped walking when they saw a woman who was moving in slow motion.

"Why are you moving in slow motion?" Mark said to her.

"It's just to make fun of the man chasing me," she said.

"What man?"

She stopped and looked around. "Well there was someone chasing me a few minutes ago."

Mark said, "If there was someone chasing you, he'd have caught you while you were moving in slow motion."

"Are you saying I imagined the whole thing?"

"No, I'm saying if there was someone chasing you, he'd have caught you while you were moving in slow motion."

"I bet he's hiding behind that hedge," she said.

She tip-toed towards the end of the hedge, with Hugh and Mark just behind her. When she got to the corner, she jumped out and said, "Aha!" But he wasn't there. "I bet he's hiding behind those trees."

She tip-toed to the trees, jumped and said 'aha!', but again there was no one there. Hugh asked why he was chasing her, and she said, "Because I have his dark glasses." She held up the glasses. "He couldn't hear anything on the phone when he wore these. They're really dark. He eventually figured out it was because he couldn't find the phone. But he liked not being able to hear people because he could choose who he wanted to listen to. Although it didn't really work when he couldn't find the phone because he couldn't hear anyone, but after he figured out what was going on, he'd just pick up the phone and say hello, and if it was someone he didn't want to talk to he'd keep saying 'hello?' over and over again, and they'd say 'take off your glasses' but he'd pretend he couldn't hear. He's expecting a call from the people he sold a ladder to. There's no way I'm giving the glasses back until he apologises for saying my cat looked like a hole in his garden."

"Well shouldn't you be trying to hide from him," Hugh said, "rather than trying to find him?"

"I hadn't thought of that."

"And he'll just pretend he's wearing the glasses on the phone anyway. He doesn't actually need the glasses."

"I hadn't thought of that either."

They heard footsteps on a stone path that emerged from the trees. She didn't have time to run, but she didn't need to because it wasn't the man who was chasing her, assuming she didn't imagine him. And if she did imagine him it wouldn't have been him anyway.

"Damn!" she said. "I mean, phew, it's not him."

She started to wonder if she'd imagined Hugh and Mark when she looked around. They were gone, and so was the man who appeared on the path, Trevor.

Flo and Trevor had formed a plan. He'd chase them around the shed, and Flo would be there to stop them with a shovel. But on the way to the shed, Hugh and Mark ran into the maze, and Trevor ran past the entrance.

Flo was waiting behing the shed. She was ready with the shovel when she heard the footsteps, and she swung as soon as she saw a figure appear from around the side. She hit Trevor on the head, and he fell to the ground.

He looked dazed, and he didn't move. Hugh, Mark, Imelda and Quinny all gathered around him. They looked down at him in silence. That lasted for about thirty seconds, until Imelda started laughing. The others joined in. Trevor managed a faint laugh too, but he didn't know what he was laughing at. Even at the best of times, there were many things he didn't know.

The moose's head over the fireplace loves reading sheet music. He's fascinated by the dots. He prefers reading the music to hearing it, and not just when I play the piano. He must be reading something else into the dots. I tried reading the music myself, and it can be very exciting if you read something else into the black dots. But you could say that about lots of things. There's more action in the carpet's pattern than in anything on TV, apart from all the moving coloured dots in the snooker.

Jimmy Magee

I sat on a wooden seat in the garden. There seemed to be a lot more flowers and flower pots around the place. Of course, some of those things are explained by Spring. There's a squirrel with a small torch in a tree, and he's pretending he knows what to do with the torch, even though he clearly doesn't. I'm just going to put that one down to Spring and forget about it.

My cousin Charlie once fell off a trampoline and landed on a kennel, but he enjoyed it. One of the reasons he went on the trampoline in the first place was because he thought there was a good chance he'd fall off it and land on something. He was going out with a woman called Grainne who was always making fun of Andie MacDowell. He often told her about his fall, and every time he told the story he remembered details he hadn't remembered before. His friends made fun of the fall, when they weren't calling him 'Jimmy Magee'. They called him that because he once confused Ben Johnson with Andre Agassi. It was meant to be ironic, because Jimmy Magee, the sports commentator, would never make a mistake like that. Grainne wasn't bothered when they called him that, because she thought Jimmy Magee was the lead singer in a boyband, but that singer's name was made up entirely of capital letters and numbers.

She took him shopping for clothes one day, and she convinced him to buy a shirt with the writings of Thomas Aquinas printed all over it. It didn't take much convincing because he thought Thomas Aquinas was a footballer.

He wore it when they went to watch a football match that evening, and everyone was interested in the shirt. A friend of his said, "What's that line about the conflict between reason and faith?"

"I think it's something about resting players for a cup game to save them for the league."

A friend of theirs, Emily, was an optician. She was good at everything she did, and she had a habit of winning whatever competition she entered, but she only got the second prize in a charity draw. The prize was 250 kilograms of ice cream, and she was glad she came second because the first prize was 500 frogs.

She gave out free ice cream in her shop. If you knew her, you didn't even have to get an eye test or buy new glasses to get the ice cream, so her friends spent a lot of time there.

Emily's sister, Denise, never won anything. She felt inferior to her sister, but Emily did her best to encourage her. When Denise came up with her own recipe for a breakfast cereal, Emily gave out free samples with the ice cream.

But it looked as if Denise wouldn't need her sister's help to make her latest venture a success. The captain of a ship ordered three-hundred boxes of the cereal for a long sea voyage.

Charlie and Grainne tried some when they called in for some ice cream one day, and it wasn't bad, but you wouldn't find crowds rushing to an optician's to get free samples of it. And there was a big crowd there for the ice cream.

"The place has never been busier," Emily said.

"If you had really bad eye-sight you'd wonder if you were in the right place," Charlie said.

"Imagine what they're doing in the hardware shop with the 500 frogs."

Actually, they weren't doing anything in the hardware shop. They were just very scared.

Charlie tried on a pair of glasses. He looked at the writing on his shirt to see if the words were any clearer, and when he read them again, the penny dropped. The shirt had nothing to do with football. "A first mover which is not moved or changed by any other!" he said.

He understood it perfectly, or he thought he did. It wasn't about Roy Keane anyway. He came to the conclusion that the glasses had made him intelligent.

He bought the glasses, and he wore them for days. He felt wiser, and more serene. He wanted to pass on his knowledge.

Grainne's younger brother had formed a metal band. They were being mentored by a man called Fork who'd been in a rock band since the early seventies. Charlie heard him talk to the band in the garden one day, but there wasn't much to hear. Fork had clearly run out of things to say. He was just saying the word 'never' over and over again. Charlie decided to step in and take over the mentoring duties.

He said to the band, "Look all around you. That's how you learn, by looking. You see see these things every day, but do you really see them?"

He took them to the cinema, and as they watched the film he said, "Look at the images but don't look at them. Just look at the images."

They sat on the grass in a garden, surrounded by daisies and other wild flowers. Creepers covered a red brick wall nearby, and the shadow of a tree crept across the lawn. "Let things look at you," Charlie said. "And just let them look at you."

Fork didn't like being pushed aside, but he found another student in Dave, who'd left the band to pursue a solo career throwing stones at things. Fork taught him everything he knew about China, which wasn't very much, so he threw in everything he knew about Australia too and he pretended it was about China.

They met Charlie and the band later, and Fork said to Dave, "Tell them what you learnt about China."

"They eat rice and wrestle crocodiles."

"While you were teaching them about clouds and hugging trees," Fork said to Charlie, "he learnt about wrestling crocodiles."

"They learnt about life," Charlie said. "And the world. And how to look at things. And how to let things look at you. You wouldn't know about that because things don't want to look at you."

"Be careful what you say, my friend. I can outsmart you with what's inside my head, or I can just use the outside of my head and you won't know what day it is."

"You don't know what day it is anyway."

"Your shoes make you look like an ostrich." Fork changed the subject because he wasn't a hundred percent sure what day it was.

Denise called to see Charlie later that day. She told him about the ship's captain who had ordered her cereal. The order had fallen through because he got lost before the voyage even began. He was walking home through the fields and he was looking into a bottle of rum to see if there was any left. There wasn't any rum left, but there was something in the bottle. Whatever it was, it was moving. He kept walking as he looked into the bottle, and no one had seen him for days.

She needed to pay her suppliers, and she couldn't ask her sister because it would be humiliating. She asked Charlie for his help, because of his reputation for being wise. He looked around for ideas, and he got a shock when he saw the metal band right behind him. "The metal band!" he said. "We'll just get them to play a gig to raise the money."

Charlie organised the gig, but when the band were supposed to be on-stage, they were miles away at the edge of an orchard, facing the setting sun. They just stood there. In the past, they always thought they knew exactly what was going to happen to them, and they walked on with confidence, but they were confused after Charlie's lessons. They had a feeling that they didn't really know what was going to happen. And they didn't like the idea of everything looking at them either.

A man in the orchard started playing the musical saw. The band were completely motionless as they listened to the sad music. They thought about how a huge saw is more metal than any instruments they play, and it makes such sad and beautiful music.

A tree fell on the path ahead of them. It was just a small tree in a pot, but still, if they hadn't stopped, who knows what might have happened.

The man who was playing the saw became their mentor. He didn't say very much. He just played the saw. They didn't really know what that meant either, but it was much less confusing than their previous lessons.

When the band didn't turn up for the gig, the audience trashed the place, and Charlie was told he'd have to pay for the damage.

He tried to think of another plan to raise money. The only thing he could think of was organising another gig, but the band said they'd only play the saw. Charlie didn't think that was a very good idea with an audience of metal fans, especially after what happened the last time.

He still promised Denise he'd find a way of raising the money. He had the glasses to provide the extra intelligence he needed, although his thought processes were hampered by the continual taunts of Fork.

They were watching television one evening. Charlie was flicking through the channels, and Jimmy Magee appeared on the screen. One of Charlie's friends said, "Look, that's you, Jimmy Magee."

"That's Jimmy Magee?" Grainne said.

"Yeah."

"Oh right. When I saw him there I just thought it was Andie MacDowell at first."

Charlie turned it over to another channel. A quiz show was on. Denise stood up and said, "That's it! We could get the money I need and the money you need to pay for the damage if we just entered this quiz show. And when I say 'we' I mean Charlie and Fork. I know it's a lot to ask, but if the two of ye put ye'r differences to one side and joined forces, there's no way ye could fail. How could two men with such wisdom fail to win a quiz show on TV?"

They solemnly accepted their mission.

Charlie wore his glasses on the show. Fork wore the headband he found on the street outside the dentist's surgery that Jimi Hendrix once went to. But neither of them could get any of the questions right. The third contestant kept buzzing in before them, and he got a good few wrong, but he got enough right to give him a healthy lead. Charlie thought he knew a question about China, but he didn't buzz in because he thought Fork would surely know. Fork said he missed it because he was adjusting his headband.

Charlie took off the glasses before the last round, and it was then that his luck started to change. The topics for each round were randomly chosen, and 'sport' finally came up. Charlie got every single one right, and he won the quiz with the last question.

When he met his friends later he said, "Who's Jimmy Magee now? I am."

The moose's head over the fireplace still looks tired after the final of the world snooker championships. Thirteen hours of looking at a green table. It was exciting, though. If it wasn't, you'd just look at the ceiling instead, which has become very exciting since the wife got a goldfish bowl. The lights are reflected onto the ceiling by the water. It's better than watching the goldfish. The goldfish must have enjoyed the snooker. They got all the tension and drama without the knowledge that they've been watching it for thirteen hours.