Craig in Love

I love the smell of the garden after the grass has been cut. It's nice to walk around the place and look at things and say, "Hm. I haven't noticed that before. I hope it doesn't bury anything else." And walk on again.

My cousin Craig loved looking at houses and thinking about things. He hated looking at his trousers, but he had to do it every so often. He normally only did it when he noticed other people looking at them a lot. One day everyone was looking at them, but he didn't notice because he was in love.

Her name was Gillian, and he had met her at a barbeque. Her eyes did something to his knees that his previous girlfriend had failed to accomplish with a tennis racket. But he never got a chance to be alone with her because a friend of his spent most of the night telling her why you shouldn't trust people pretending to be leprechauns.

He was in love with her and he was determined to make her fall in love with him too. He bought her little presents, but one of them ran away and hid in her house. Craig kept saying, "It wasn't supposed to do that." She got angrier every time he said it.

He serenaded her with a song about love. He was accompanied by a Mexican band, but they didn't like bees. They weren't really Mexican either. He was angry that they hadn't mentioned either of these things beforehand, because when a bee joined the group they started swinging at it with their guitars and shouting obscenities in English. They didn't know any Spanish obscenities. Some of them hid in her house. Craig said, "They definitely weren't supposed to do that. I specifically asked them not to do it."

One of the band ran from the house beneath a rug that he found in front of Gillian's fireplace. He was trying to hide from the bee. He ran through the fields. Craig and Gillian chased him.

They saw him climbing over a gate, but when they climbed the gate ten seconds later they couldn't see him anywhere. It was nearly dark. Craig didn't know which way to go, and neither did the man who was telling him which way to go. "You just have one thing to do," Craig said. "One thing, and you can't even do that."

"Ah... Try going that way," the man said.

"You don't sound too sure of that."

"No really, that way. I think you should definitely go over there."

Craig went over there, but 'there' contained a bull. He looked around, but the man who was telling him where to go had gone, and so had Gillian. Craig ran away.

He went to see Gillian on the following day. He asked her if she'd go out with him that evening, but she said, "The man who was telling you where to go is taking me out to dinner. He told me somewhere you could go, if you asked."

"No, that's okay."

"Sorry."

"Just give me one more chance. I know you're the one for me, and I must be the one for you too."

"I'm sorry, but I just don't think it's going to work."

"Okay... Would it make any difference if I changed my trousers?"

"Definitely."

Craig went home and put on his best pair of trousers. He came back and asked her out again. She said, "I'd love to," and it looked as if his eyes were doing to her knees what her eyes had always done to his. His knees, that is. He told the man who was telling him where to go where to go.

The moose's head over the fireplace doesn't like pieces of string, little dogs and waiters. These are the latest three items to be added to the list of things he doesn't like. Frogs and staplers are on the list of things he likes. Candles are on the list of things he doesn't believe in. His list of potential winners of the World Cup contains five teams, but there are only eight teams still left in the competition. I think he's just waiting to see who'll win the quarter-final between Argentina and Germany.