The Ghost

I still think it's not the right time to put up the Christmas decorations. Our neighbour built a swimming pool in his garden, and it's definitely the wrong time of year for that. It started out as a grave, but he just kept going.

My cousin Hector and his wife, Liz, discovered that their first house was haunted shortly after they moved into it. Hector saw the ghost first. He noticed a faint light emerging from a wall upstairs, and then he saw the light take on the form of a person, a man who looked as if he had just emerged from a fight and was yet to emerge from drunkenness. The fact that he was dead suggested that he took the wrong exit out of the fight. He smiled at Hector, who screamed and ran downstairs.

They hadn't been told about their tenant. They went to see the estate agent to complain about this. He said, "I apologise most sincerely, but in my defence, I am in the middle of a nervous breakdown."

"Is that why you're wearing a pink skirt?" Liz said.

"No. I think you'll find that a ghost is nowhere near as bad as dry rot or bad neighbours. Think of it as a guard dog."

"You still should have told us," Hector said.

"In the past I've had nervous breakdowns that have been no more annoying than a fly flying around my head. But this one caught me right between the eyes. It's as if someone painted a target there."

"Just for the record," Liz said, "I like your pink skirt. I think it goes well with your tie."

"Thanks."

Hector stood up and left before the estate agent crossed his legs again.

My uncle Harry knew of a man who specialised in getting rid of ghosts. Harry got the man's phone number from someone in the pub. Hector phoned him and told him about the problem they were having. The man, who's name was Leo, refused to accept it was a problem at all, but he agreed to call around anyway.

He arrived on the following evening. He was a tall man, and he wore a long dark-grey coat. His hair was gelled back. There was always a faint smile on his face, even as he stood on the landing and saw the ghost for the first time. The ghost bowed and said, "Good evening."

After the sighting, Leo spent twenty minutes pacing from one end of the sitting room to the other. He said he needed time to think. The faint smile never left his face, and he never said a word. Hector couldn't take the silence any longer. "Have you ever had a nervous breakdown?" he said to Leo.

"No. Being prone to mental peaks and troughs wouldn't be conducive to success in my line of work."

"Have you ever worn a skirt?"

"I should point out that I am utterly humourless. It's necessary for true success. Mildly successful people can be self-deprecating, but it's something you must eradicate if you're to fulfil your potential. I take myself too seriously. I've also eradicated humility, charity, compassion and all of the other neuroses brought about by this culture's fascination with itself."

"So as someone who's impervious to mental breakdown, and as someone who has eliminated all these neuroses, you're saner than us?"

"Precisely. Except you don't know what 'sane' really means. Your conception of 'sane' is vastly different to mine, and you think your conception is closer to the truth, but consider this: when you saw that ghost for the first time you were screaming like a lunatic, and when I saw him I didn't bat an eyelid."

"In fairness, your occupation would bring you into contact with dead people all the time, but it's an area I have no familiarity with."

"Pop music is full of songs about the menacing activity of the deceased. Like 'Raspberry Beret'."

"The Prince song?"

"Yes. 'Pinball Wizard', 'Vogue', 'Penny Lane', 'Girls Just Want To Have Fun' and 'Autobahn' -- all about dead people. But not 'I Will Always Love You'. That's about bed-wetting."

"My idea of sane would be different to yours alright. Is there anything you can do about the ghost?"

"What do you mean by 'do'?"

"Get rid of him."

"You really should consider letting him stay. Familiarity breeds unfamiliarity. You become familiar with your surroundings and you forget about them. You forget the initial impact they had. After a few weeks, the ghost would be no more unwelcome than a spider's web."

"We couldn't become familiar with a ghost."

"Is a ghost really any stranger than a husband or a wife?"

"Yes."

"If aliens landed and you showed them the workings of a marriage and the way a ghost haunts people, they'd say the marriage would be much stranger."

"Aliens would be stranger than anything. If Liberace said you had good taste in clothes, it doesn't mean you have good taste in clothes."

"Now that Liberace is dead I'm sure he's developed a more refined taste in sartorial matters. He'd be able to see his past endeavours in clothing from a higher perspective. Liberace would say that marriage is stranger than ghosts too."

"Can you get rid of the ghost or not?"

"'Getting rid of the ghost', as you so callously put it, involves finding another home. A ghost is for eternity, not just for life. You wouldn't throw a puppy out on the street after Christmas."

"You wouldn't get a ghost for your kids."

"Kids wouldn't get bored of a ghost. And they'd never have to feed or groom it. People tell their kids about a man who travels all around the world in one night on a sled pulled by reindeer, a man who can get into the house through the chimney, and yet they wouldn't dream of getting a ghost. They get something that will eat their shoes instead. Insanity has been re-packaged in the modern world and re-labelled 'sanity'."

"Can't you just catch him and put him somewhere?" Liz said.

"This isn't 'Ghostbusters'. I'll try to find a suitable home for him, and in the meantime ye need to convince him that it would be in his interests to move."

"How are we going to do that?"

"Make life uncomfortable for him. Have fish fingers for dinner every day."

"How is that going to make him uncomfortable?"

"I've never come across a ghost who wasn't repulsed by fish fingers. It might be different with ghosts who had been acquainted with fish fingers while they were alive, but for the older ghosts the very concept of fish fingers seems wrong. They seem wrong to me too. Why should fish be more appealing when they're re-packaged as fingers?"

"And this will make him want to leave?"

"It could take a few months of eating fish fingers before he decides to leave, but ye can speed up the process by playing The Bee Gees. Ghosts hate The Bee Gees. It might have something to do with the frequencies in their music, or the fact that most of their songs are about accounting errors."

Hector and Liz ate fish fingers every day, and they noticed that the ghost was starting to look paler. They played Bee Gee's albums with the volume up. Liz saw the ghost on the landing one evening when the sound of 'Night Fever' filled the house. She noticed the disturbed look on his face and she said, "You look as if you've just seen a ghost."

She offered him some fish fingers and he looked as if he wanted to be able to get sick.

Leo called around one evening and he said he'd found a potential home for the ghost. "The house is only half a mile away," he said. "The owner of this place could do with a good haunting. Not that that matters to either of ye. As long as ye don't know him and can't imagine the torment he'll endure, that's all that matters to ye."

"What if he tries to get rid of the ghost?" Hector said.

"I'll offer my services. I'll try to convince him to keep the ghost. If this fails, I'll send the ghost to another house. I'll find a home for him eventually."

"So how do we get the ghost to switch houses?"

"Invite this man around for a drink. If you mention the word 'drink' he'll definitely come around. Say ye want to get to know the neighbours. By this stage, the ghost should be sick of the fish fingers and The Bee Gees. While this man is here, ask him questions to let the ghost know what he's like. He's not a very pleasant man, but that won't put the ghost off. His position on fish fingers and The Bee Gees should swing the deal. When I say 'pleasant' I mean the modern world's conception of pleasantness, which, of course, is based on insanity, which is like building a house on the surface of the sea. His unpleasantness is founded on a platform of common sense. It isn't really unpleasantness at all, but that's what it's labelled by the modern world. It emerges into this world as a weed but beneath the surface it has strong, laudatory roots, unlike the so-called flowers of this world that have weak roots."

This neighbour's name was Terry. Hector appreciated a good malt whiskey, and he mentioned this when he invited Terry around for a drink. Terry gladly accepted the invitation.

He called around that evening. Hector filled his glass to the brim and gave him the seat by the fire. When Hector asked him what he did for a living he said he was a food critic. Liz saw a perfect chance to bring up the fish fingers. She asked Terry what he thought of them and he said, "I spit on fish fingers. Literally. It's a horrible thing to do to fish. I'd sooner do it to fingers. If there's any justice in this world, the inventor of fish fingers should have nightmares about losing all of his fingers, and watching them being eaten by someone inferior to him, someone he once walked over to avoid getting his shoes wet in a puddle. But there's no justice in this world, only injustice. The inventor of fish fingers is probably feted as a hero, and he dreams of inferior people worshipping him. You shouldn't look up to anyone unless you can look down on the vast majority of people. Only then will you see the genuinely superior people above you. If you can't look down on anyone, then almost everyone could a hero. That's why people who invent fish fingers make millions and people who compose music for harpsichords are virtually unknown."

"Do you like music for harpsichords?" Hector said.

"Music took a wrong turn in the early part of the twentieth century. Everything I enjoy comes from before that time. Everything since then makes my ears bleed."

"I don't suppose you like The Bee Gees so."

"They make my brain bleed."

He spent the next three hours ranting about music, food, drink, politics, people who do things to their hair, the quality of carpets and Fred Flintstone, amongst other things. He drank a few glasses of the whiskey during that time. The whiskey kept out the cold on the walk home down the quiet road and it blurred the world around him. He didn't notice the ghost following him.

The ghost ended up staying with him. Terry called in the services of Leo, who pointed out all the benefits of having a ghost in the house. He got on well with Leo, and it didn't take long for Leo to sell the idea of a dead tenant. The thing that appealed most to Terry was the thought of frightening the kids who called at Halloween. He hated being forced into a choice between trick or treat. Now he had a third option: terrify the little terrors with a ghost.

The moose's head over the fireplace enjoys listening to a CD of sounds from the Sahara. It's mostly just the sound of wind. When the wife's uncle heard it he said it reminded him of the time he travelled through Africa with a friend who brought a lot of prejudices with him on the trip. He was afraid of being eaten by cannibals, so he tattooed a 'best before' date on his foot. On his shoulder he tattooed the words 'See foot for best before date'.

Traffic Lights

Some of the neighbours have already put up the Christmas decorations in their gardens. I'll wait for another few weeks before I get them out of the shed. When they're out of the way it might be easier to catch the mouse. I'd use a trap, but my grandfather thought it was unfair to use traps on mice. He once grew a moustache, but it always tried to get away as he slept. He used to put mouse traps around the bed to catch it. It got away just before a moustache contest, so he trained a mouse to take its place, and he won a prize too. He respected mice after this, and he stopped using traps to catch them. If he couldn't catch them with a net, he wouldn't catch them at all. He couldn't catch them at all.

My cousin Albert was in the pub one night with his friends, George and Neil. Neil started complaining about the road works on the road to his house. They were only supposed to last a week, but they had gone on for nearly three months. Neil was sick of waiting at the temporary traffic lights.

When they left the pub, Neil said he was going to steal the lights on the walk home. "No one will see me do it," he said. "It's a very quiet road. I could push the lights all the way home and no one would ever know."

Albert had only been concerned with getting home to bed at the time. Under normal circumstances he'd have been only too happy to witness Neil steal the lights, but an evening of drinking after a game of football made him want to sleep.

When he woke on the following morning he remembered what Neil said. He phoned George and said, "Do you know if Neil actually stole the traffic lights last night?"

"I don't know. There's a good chance he tried, but I'd imagine he'd lose interest fairly quickly."

"I'd love to find out how far he got."

"Let's go and investigate," George said. He always said things like that because he wanted to be a policeman so he could investigate crimes and jump out of moving cars. But if he really became a policeman he'd have to stand in the rain at check points and arrest people for exposing themselves in public. And he'd have to meet real criminals too, and run away from them in fear.

Albert and George walked down the narrow road towards Neil's house. One set of the lights was still there, but the other one was missing. It wasn't a danger to drivers because the road works were on a straight stretch of road. Albert and George walked on, expecting to find the lights abandoned somewhere on the road between the road works and Neil's house, but they got as far as Neil's house without finding them.

They walked around the house and found the lights outside the back door. Albert phoned Neil, who came down to the door a few minutes later. He only remembered the lights when he saw them.

Neil's brother, Jason, was a stand-up comedian, and if he found out about Neil stealing the lights, he'd use the story in his act. In his first gig, he ran out of jokes after thirty seconds. When he had practised his routine he left long pauses for the laughter, so he thought his routine would go on for twenty minutes. To fill the time, he started telling stories about his family, and that's when people started laughing. Not only did the audience find these stories funny, but he was able to offend his family as well, which was an added bonus. He had already used the story about the time Neil knocked himself unconscious with a frozen cabbage. He wouldn't hesitate to use the story of the stolen traffic lights, and he'd embellish it too. He managed to get the character of a Kung Fu teacher into the story of the cabbage.

Neil was desperate to prevent Jason from finding out about the lights. "We have to hide them somewhere," he said.

"Where?" George said.

"Anywhere will do. As long as it can't be pinned on me."

The house was on the side of a hill. The pole that held the lights was in a metal box that had wheels at either side, so they could either push the lights up the hill or let them roll down. They chose the latter. They took the lights to the bridge at the bottom of the hill, and left them in the field next to the stream.

When they got back to Neil's house, Jason was having his breakfast. He said, "Was I imagining things, or did I see traffic lights outside the back door when I got home from the pub last night?"

"You were imagining things," Neil said. He realised then that Jason would eventually hear about the missing traffic lights, and he'd remember the imaginary traffic lights outside the back door. He'd put two and two together and blame Neil. So they had to return the lights to their rightful place before they were reported missing.

They didn't want to be seen with the traffic lights, so they put an old coat and a hat on the set of lights and pushed it up the hill. They didn't notice at the time, but a man called Brushy saw them. He was hiding behind a ditch. This was something he often did, because he assumed that most people had something to hide, and they'd hide it if they thought he could see them. He was immediately suspicious of the strange individual in the hat and coat. He noticed the wheels beneath the coat, and he assumed that this individual wasn't human at all -- it was a robot. His cousin Derry was always telling him about the robots taking over the world. Derry had built many weapons to kill the robots. Brushy went to see Derry and he said, "I just saw a robot. It's wearing a hat and a coat, but it's definitely a robot."

"It begins," Derry said with a smile.

When Albert, George, Neil and the traffic lights made it to the top of the hill, they were confronted by Derry and Brushy. Derry had something that looked like a crossbow. "Don't bother saying your prayers," Derry said. "You're going straight to robot hell."

He aimed at the traffic lights. Albert, George and Neil ran for cover. The crossbow was designed to light the arrow head as it was fired. This worked perfectly, but the arrow went to the right of the target and it hit a shed in a field. The shed caught fire. Albert, George, Neil, Derry and Brushy all ran to Neil's place, which was just down the road. They returned to the shed with buckets of water, and they were able to put out the fire.

Derry looked around and said, "Damn! He's escaped."

"Who?" Neil said.

"The robot."

They realised that he was talking about the traffic lights, and they also realised that the traffic lights hadn't escaped, but they had rolled down the hill. They ran down the road, and they found the traffic lights in a field owned by a man called Blarney. Blarney was in there with the lights.

"Allow me to introduce ye to my new scarecrow," he said.

"That's actually a set of traffic lights," Albert said.

"It was a set of traffic lights. As soon as it landed on my land, it ceased to be traffic lights. There's no traffic here."

"How did it get over the gate?"

"I had to help it over the gate. But it clearly wanted to get over. It rolled right into them. If you look up the laws of the land you'll find it written in black and white that if a man finds a set of traffic lights on his land, he's perfectly entitled to use it as a scarecrow and he's legally obliged to headbutt anyone who touches his new scarecrow. I'd headbutt the people who touched my old scarecrow, if I knew who they were, as long as they weren't women. If they were women and they touched the scarecrow, that's okay, because the scarecrow was clearly a man. I checked. But if they were men, there was something seriously wrong with that."

"What happened your old scarecrow?"

"The feckers stole it. If they were women, he's gone to a better place. He wasn't much good after they started touching him anyway."

They left Blarney with his new scarecrow. "You don't have to worry now," Albert said to Neil. "The traffic lights will be reported missing and they'll be found in Blarney's field. He'll be blamed. Jason will think he must have seen the lights in Blarney's field on the way home."

"Blarney isn't going to take the blame. He'll start quoting legal precedent and he'll tell the story of how the lights came to be on his land. People will find out that I stole the lights and then dressed them in a coat and a hat. And they'll find out about the shed catching fire as well. Can you imagine if Jason found out about all that?"

"We're just going to have to take her back," Derry said.

"Who's 'her'?" Albert said.

"The lights. Who else?"

"You think the lights are female?"

"Of course they are."

"I think so too," Neil said. "I got to spend a bit of time with them on my way home from the pub last night, and I got the impression they were female."

George said, "If only real women gave such clear signals."

"They do," Neil said. "In my experience it's nearly always red."

"What about Michelle?" Albert said. "She's always green."

"Her sister is always amber. She must have her own sun bed."

"I'd love if women were as easy to read as traffic lights," George said. "I can never make out their signals and I always assume it's red."

Brushy said, "I heard a story about a woman who used to pass a scarecrow after midnight every night. She loved her night walks. She said hello to the scarecrow every time she passed and one night he said hello to her. He was able to say more with every passing night, and eventually he learnt how to walk. They fell in love. They went to see a wizard to ask him to give the scarecrow working sexual organs so he could make love to her. The wizard granted this wish and they made love. She gave birth to a child that was half-scarecrow and half-human, but he was even better at scaring crows than his father. He wasn't bad at scaring humans either."

Neil said, "I've got to try and steal the scarecrow when Blarney goes back to his house. I'll need ye to stall him while I make my getaway. I've only got to get the lights as far as the road works. Blarney wouldn't dare steal them from there."

Albert, George, Brushy and Derry went to Blarney's farmhouse later that day. They hid behind a ditch at the other side of the road, and they watched him leave the house. He walked down the road, and as soon as he turned the corner they got out and followed him. They ran to the corner and looked around it, but there was no sign of Blarney. They got a shock when they heard a cough behind them, and they got a greater shock when they turned around and saw Blarney holding a shotgun. "Why are ye following me?" he said.

"We're not," Albert said.

"What are ye up to?"

"Nothing."

"And what do ye think I'm up to?"

"We don't think you're up to anything."

"Isn't that more-or-less the same as nothing?"

"Yeah."

"So that must be why we're all going in the same direction. We're up to the same thing."

"That must be it."

"I'll answer my initial question for ye: ye'r eyeballs in something noxious. That's what ye're up to. Ye're in it up to that. But that's not what I'm up to at all. I'll soon be up to my knees in bits of ye."

"We just wanted to know something. Is your traffic light scarecrow a man or a woman?"

"What sort of a question is that?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know?"

"No. I can't answer your question. I don't really understand your question."

"Do you want me to re-phrase it for you?"

"That might help."

"Do you want me to kill you?"

"Was that your re-phrasing of the question or was it a new one entirely?"

"That was the re-phrasing. Don't ask me how it relates to the other one, because I can't even remember what the other one was. I'd have to answer 'I don't know', and we'd just be back where we started from."

"Where did we start from?"

"I don't know. I can't remember."

"I think it was when I asked you about the gender of the traffic lights. I was just wondering if you checked. Because you checked your old scarecrow. And didn't you have to touch your old scarecrow to check that?"

"Is this your way of answering 'yes' to the question 'Do you want me to kill you?'?"

"No. I'm just curious."

"That's probably what those feckers who touched my scarecrow would say, assuming they weren't women."

"Why wouldn't a woman touch a scarecrow out of curiosity?"

"You're going to have to re-phrase that one for me."

"Okay. Ahm... What have you got against men touching your scarecrow?"

"Do you want men touching your scarecrow?"

"I don't have a scarecrow, but if I had one I wouldn't mind men or women touching it. As long as they don't steal it or damage the crops. But then, I wouldn't think of the scarecrow as being male, but you seem fairly sure that yours was male. What exactly did you touch?"

Blarney pointed his gun at Albert and said, "I'll need to find out what you're really up to before I kill you."

"We were just distracting you while Neil steals your scarecrow. When he does, legally it'll no longer be your scarecrow. It'll be the County Council's traffic lights. And before you start thinking of killing Neil for touching your scarecrow, he believes that the traffic lights are female. Something must have happened on the way home from the pub last night to make him think that. I don't know if he touched them."

Blarney got his tractor and drove to the field. Albert and the others were hoping that Neil had returned the lights to their rightful place before Blarney caught up with him, but he didn't quite make it. Neil and the lights were just a hundred yards away from the road works. Blarney pointed his gun at Neil and said, "Take that scarecrow back to the field."

"No."

"Take him back now, or I'll shoot either him or you."

"It's not a scarecrow, and it's female, not male."

"It's male."

"Do you want to tell us how you found that out? Or do you want to accept that it's female? And do you want to make a woman do the work of a scarecrow?"

"You stole those lights, and they ended up doing the job of a scarecrow in my field. That's an admission on the part of the lights that it's really a scarecrow and really a man. You stole my scarecrow. Put it back."

"No. You put it back if you want it. You can steal these traffic lights. I've already done it once and I've found that it was once too often. I was drunk at the time. I could say that about a lot of my encounters with women. Women would certainly say it about their encounters with me."

They heard laughter behind them. It was Jason. "I saw ye pushing something up the hill earlier," he said. "I was wondering what was going on, and now I know the truth. And it's a dazzling truth. This is one of the best ones ever. I don't even have to embellish this one very much. I think it's perfectly fair to infer a love scene with traffic lights. Or with a scarecrow. Was it a man or was it a woman? Does it matter?"

Brushy said to Jason, "Did you get your trousers back from that dog?"

Jason looked shocked at first. Then he recovered his composure and said, "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Maybe you don't remember," Brushy said. "You were on your way home from the pub last week and you saw a Frisbee stuck in a tree, so you threw a shoe at it to get it down, but the shoe got stuck there too. I suppose you didn't want to throw your other shoe in case that got stuck as well. At least you could hop home if you had one shoe. So you took your trousers off and threw them. They didn't get stuck. They fell back to the ground, but a dog got them, and he ran off with them. You hopped after him."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Jason said, but he looked as if he was painfully aware of what Brushy was talking about.

"I saw you," Brushy said. "Admittedly, I was hiding in a tree at the time, but it was definitely you."

Neil smiled. "Have you ever considered becoming a stand-up comedian?" he said to Brushy. "That would make such a funny story. It's the sort of thing the whole town would love to hear."

Jason was too horrified to say anything.

They left Blarney there with the lights. Neil didn't care if he stole them. He did. And Neil didn't care if his brother told the story of stealing the traffic lights. The thought that Brushy would tell the story about Jason was compensation enough for that embarrassment. Jason didn't tell the story of stealing the traffic lights, but Brushy did. He changed the names of the people involved, and in his telling of the story the traffic lights gave birth to a child that was half-human and half-traffic-light.

The moose's head over the fireplace is wearing his headphones again. It's to drown out the sound of my latest attempt to learn how to play the piano. I've often tried before, but I can never get my two hands to work together. The wife's aunt says that when she was four she could play the piano with two hands while the other one strangled a cat.

Scobby

The garden disappears into darkness at half-five every day. There isn't much to see then, although I thought I saw a faint light in the orchard yesterday, and the dog has been barking at something in there. My grandfather would have put this down to a ghost and he'd have started shooting indiscriminately. The wife's uncle says that all you need do to control a ghost is show no fear. It's like with dogs, he says. You should climb a step-ladder or start looking for something in your pockets or sing self-penned songs about shooting holes in the floor -- do whatever you'd normally do.

My cousin Hugh is engaged to a woman called Annabel. She once asked him to take her younger brother, Andy, to a party where he was supposed to entertain kids by dressing up as Scooby Doo and doing whatever Scooby does. He couldn't drive because of the costume, so Annabel got Hugh to drive him. Andy was twenty at the time, and his family thought he was an angel, but Hugh was well aware of his other side: the devil-may-care attitude that allowed him to get drunk and then try to jump over a cow.

When Andy got into the car (which was a bit of a struggle in the costume) he said, "Can we stop at a pub on the way?"

"You must think I'm stupid," Hugh said. "Remember the time we stopped at a pub on the way to your grandmother's birthday party? We were only there ten minutes but you managed to start a fight with a lumberjack, which I got blamed for."

"I won't drink anything this time. I just want to see a band. They're friends of mine. They're taking part in a talent contest in the pub this evening. It's starting at seven and they're the first act on. We'll only be there for a few minutes."

"Okay, but I'll be watching you like a hawk."

They sat at a table and waited for the band as a man stood at the microphone and said, "One two. One two."

"Could you get me a drink?" Andy said to Hugh. "My money is in my pocket and my pocket is inside the costume."

"No."

"Why not?"

"Why do you think why not?"

"I'm not going to get into a fight here. I need that drink. Just put yourself in my shoes, or in my costume. I have to face twenty screaming ten-year-olds. Can you understand the horror I'm facing? Can you imagine doing that sober?"

Hugh had pity on Andy and he bought the drink.

The band started playing, but their performance didn't last long. The lead singer had a phobia of magicians because he was convinced they were going to turn him into a duck. He really should have had a phobia of hypnotists because it was a hypnotist who made him think this. A magician was the next act in the talent contest. When the singer saw the magician he jumped off the stage and ran out of the pub, screaming as he went.

Andy was the first to react. He saw his chance. He jumped on the stage and took the singer's place. The audience were much more appreciative of the singer in the Scooby Doo costume. They gave him a standing ovation at the end, and when he left the stage a woman bought him a drink. Hugh tried to keep an eye on him, but he was distracted by the group's drummer, whose name was Frank. They had met before. Frank told Hugh all about the aliens he saw. When Hugh finally managed to get a word in he said he had to take Andy to the party, but there was no sign of Scooby. Frank said that Andy had slipped outside with Jennifer. A man at the next table stood up and said, "That was Andy? In the Scooby Doo costume?"

"Yeah," Frank said.

"I'll kill him."

The man left the pub, and Hugh followed with the band. As they searched for Andy, Hugh learnt that the man intent on murder was Jennifer's boyfriend. Andy had tried to chat up Jennifer before, and he'd been warned off by her boyfriend, whose name was Phil.

Andy and Jennifer were walking back towards the pub, hand in paw. When Andy saw Phil he turned around and ran. Phil chased him. Andy was impeded by the costume. He ran towards a supermarket. Before he got to the car park he turned around and saw his predator gaining ground. He'd have been better off looking the other way because he ran right into a more deadly enemy: a metal sign. He hit his head off the sign and he fell to the ground. Phil poked him with a stick, and Andy made faint Scooby-like sounds. "I don't think I have anything to add to what the sign did," Phil said, and he walked back to the pub.

Hugh was left alone with a semi-conscious Scooby. He got a trolley from the supermarket and put Andy into it. He was about half-way between the pub and the house where the party was, so he decided to go straight to the house instead of going back to his car.

It was dark at the time, but Hugh and Andy were perfectly visible under the street lights. Hugh had just launched his campaign for an upcoming local election, and he was afraid he'd be recognised. The local papers would love to get a photo of him pushing a shopping trolley full of an unconscious Scooby Doo. He wondered what he could do to hide his face. What he needed was a disguise of some sort, and there was a perfect disguise right in front of him.

Hugh took a short-cut through a park, and he took the trolley into trees, where it was completely dark. He took the Scooby costume off Andy and put it on himself. Andy laughed and said, "You're tickling me, Jennifer."

Hugh, dressed as Scooby, pushed the trolley out of the trees. To his horror, he realised that he was pushing a trolley containing a naked man. Andy must have lost his clothes in the encounter with Jennifer. The second wave of horror nearly swept Hugh away when he realised he was wearing a costume that had just been worn by a naked man. But at least that costume would conceal his identity, so he kept going.

Andy started singing 'In the Ghetto'. Hugh tried to keep him quiet, but Andy seemed completely oblivious to the fact that he was naked in public. When they got to the house where the party was, Hugh got out of the costume as quickly as he could and he helped Andy into it. Andy's mental condition meant that he wasn't in the least bit by daunted by the thought of entertaining twenty kids. Hugh left him at the door and rang the doorbell, and then he ran back to his car at the pub.

On the following day, Annabel said to Hugh, "I know what you did last night. Clare saw the whole thing."

"It wasn't my fault."

"How could it not be your fault when you lose all your clothes and my brother has to push you in a shopping trolley in public?"

"I don't know what Clare saw, but..."

"She saw Andy in his Scooby Doo costume pushing a naked man who was singing 'In the Ghetto'. Andy wouldn't say anything, but I could tell he was just trying to protect you. He told me he went with you to the party. He was obviously trying to hide something, just for your sake. I didn't tell him about what Clare saw. I don't know how he managed to put on such a great performance for the kids after what he'd been through with you."

Hugh knew there was no point in disputing this story. His version sounded too far-fetched. Clare's version didn't include a singer who was afraid he'd be turned into a duck. Andy was always getting into trouble but he always came out of it smelling of roses.

The moose's head over the fireplace is like a guard dog against ghosts. I'd imagine he'd be fairly good against burglars too. They'd get the impression they're being watched. The moose's head would never show fear when confronted by burglars or ghosts. According to my grandfather it was the moose's head who scared off the ghost of a drunk magistrate fifty years ago. The ghost never left the house, and this curtailed my grandfather's indiscriminate shooting. My grandmother insisted that it be discriminate in the house. But the moose's glare was enough to scare the ghost and make him move in with the neighbours. Apparently he's still there. The neighbours' indiscriminate shooting would suggest he's still as drunk as ever.

The Cheese

It's nice to walk around the garden and hear the sound of the dead leaves under my feet. The dog is fascinated by the sounds of autumn. The other day he stopped suddenly when he heard something. He spent nearly a minute frozen in that position, with one paw suspended in the air. It reminded me of the time my grandfather taught puppies the art of mime. All of the neighbours thought he had glass walls around the garden.

My aunt Joyce often tells stories of the people in the place where she grew up. In her late teens she used to meet her friends in the evening and go for walks down quiet country lanes. They often met a man called Peter who was over seven foot tall (according to Joyce, he had an exceptionally long neck). People used to point at him and ask him where the cheese was. It was meant to be a joke, but after years of doing it, no one could remember why it was funny. Peter himself certainly couldn't remember. He'd say he left the cheese in his shed, so they'd follow him back to his shed (Joyce is fairly sure they didn't do this when the joke started). On the way they'd meet other people who'd join Joyce and her friends. Peter often had a crowd of over twenty people following him.

In his shed they'd find his robot, which looked just like Elvis in his Vegas years, but this was before the Vegas-era Elvis (so Elvis could be regarded as the first look-alike of the thing in Peter's shed). No one knew what to make of this terrifying thing with flashing lights that moved around the shed when Peter removed the blanket that covered it. Then someone would say, "The cheese! What about the cheese?" Someone else would say, "Yeah, Peter, what about the cheese?"

At this point he'd put the blanket over his own head to immerse himself in thought. The crowd would assume that he was looking for the cheese, and to pass the time they amused themselves by playing Hipcat. Hipcat had once been an entertaining game, but no one could remember the rules, so (wearing my cutter-of-long-stories-short hat) they fought, which was more entertaining than Hipcat had ever been.

The fighting would come to an end when the robot started hitting its head with a hammer. This is when the crowd would notice that Peter had gone. They'd go outside and look around. People reacted to this situation in different ways. Some would go through the fields to look for him. Others would dig a hole, and then go into the hole, and form a committee in it. They'd only communicate in writing with people who weren't members of the committee. This would annoy some people, and Joyce would be in this group, who were unofficially known as the anti-committee collective. They'd come up with a plan to annoy the committee, a plan that almost always took the following form: throwing objects at the people in the hole. They often threw fish. The committee would object strongly, in writing, and a member of the anti-committee collective would say, "But ye asked us to do it."

The committee would insist, also in writing, that they requested no such thing. The anti-committee collective would produce a piece of paper that said 'Please throw fish at us when we're in the hole. We like it'. Joyce would say that this note was delivered to them and they were told it came from the committee in the hole. The committee would emerge from the hole and ask who gave them the note (when they were out of the hole they were freed from the restriction of having to express themselves in writing). Joyce would say it was a man, and in describing him she'd come up with outlandish details, like a big red hat or Cuban heels or leather trousers held up with a blue rope.

The committee would seek to identify this person. This quest would become the committee's reason for existence, and it gave them a new lease of life because they would have all recognised the limitations of staying in the hole. Their quest normally led them to a man called Andy, who used to be the lead singer in a rock band, or at least this was the excuse he used for his outlandish dress sense. The committee would confront him, and the anti-committee collective would be present too. The chairman of the committee would stand on a milk crate (because Andy was much taller than him) and publicly berate Andy for writing the note. Andy always responded by pushing the chairman off the milk crate. The other committee members would be frozen in shock, which was a convenient cover for the fear that would prevent them from doing anything other than running away. The chairman would eventually be returned to his feet. A brief committee meeting would take place, in which they'd agree to express their outrage in writing. They'd leave. The anti-committee collective would be left alone with Andy, and he'd always suggest going to see his brother's TV show.

Andy's brother, Joey, had a personal assistant who always carried a basket of flowers, and he pretended that that's what he wanted her to do. He was plagued by witches, and he pretended that that's what he wanted them to do because at night they were like beautiful sparkling stars around his head and they staged dramatic dreams for him that kept him entertained at night. He managed to convince everyone that he was blessed by the witches. People went to him when they needed advice about toast or frogs or anything. He insisted on measuring people's heads before giving them advice. He'd call out the measurements to his assistant, but she never wrote them down. She'd just hold the flowers, and he pretended that this is what he wanted her to do.

Some people believed that the witches were really just moths, and that they were attracted to his head because of a smell. His assistant would just smile when people asked her about this.

Joey's TV show was really just a play. Every evening he staged a new play in which actors acted out the dreams that the witches created for him. He was always asking people to tell their stories so the witches could hear them and then re-interpret those stories in dreams. The plays were performed on a stage in a field behind Joey's house. Andy would arrive with Joyce and the rest of the anti-committee collective, and they'd watch the play. Joey liked to think of it as a TV show because he believed he was competing with TV. The plays normally revolved around what happened to Joey on the previous day, and so the previous day's play was often featured again. Rita, who was a friend of Joey, was a recurring character, and for her it was like a recurring nightmare. She was always thinking about her hair. She wanted it to be a perfect statement of who she was, but she didn't know who she was. Then she met an archaeologist and she developed an interest in archaeology. She completely forgot about her hair for a few months. She became much less self-conscious. She even got up on Joey's stage to sing one evening, but she noticed everyone staring at her (as they do when you get up on the stage to sing) and she worried about her hair again. She was horrified when she saw herself in the mirror. Variations of this story were played out almost every evening, but it gradually changed every time. After a few months, she started laughing when she saw her hair in the mirror. She felt confident about getting up on the stage, and she even played herself in the play. The story about how she prepared for the role became part of the play too.

Joyce and the others would watch the actors perform until after the sun went down. At the end, Joey would ask the audience for more stories for the witches to interpret. Joyce would tell him about the cheese and their plan to annoy the committee. At this point the committee would emerge from the bushes, and the chairman would say, "I knew all along it was just a plan to annoy us. I'm going to put it in writing to prove that I knew all along."

"We didn't really want to annoy ye," Joyce would say. "But a woman in a mini-skirt told us to do it."

Joyce would describe this woman and they'd take down the details. It nearly always led them to the same woman. Before going to look for her, they'd present Andy with their written complaint about his behaviour when he pushed the chairman off the milk crate. Andy would always set this on fire. The chairman would say, "Expect an even stronger-worded complaint the next time."

The committee would leave. Joey would want to find out more about the people who went through the fields to look for Peter, so the witches could hear their story. Andy and the anti-committee collective would go to look for these people.

On one occasion they found the other people with a ship's captain. They were helping him look for some of his crew, who ran away because they were afraid of a were-wolf. On most other nights they found the other people with a man called Conn, who used to walk through the fields every evening. He'd tell them stories about supernatural creatures that he'd shot. He might well have met the crew from the ship and frightened them even more, or else eased their doubts by convincing them that he'd shot the were-wolf.

They'd all go back to Peter's shed because someone would notice a fire next to it. The robot would have started a bonfire. They'd find Peter under the blanket in the shed. Someone would lift the blanket and he'd hand them a piece of paper or a battery or whatever he had found in his pocket. "There it is," he'd say.

The next time they'd meet him on the road they'd say, "Where's the cheese?" And then they'd go back to his shed and go through the whole process again.

These evenings would be represented in Joey's plays on the following evening. The plays always included a scandalous story about what the committee got up to with the woman in the yellow mini-skirt. The committee would issue a statement denying the story, and they'd blame political rivals for trying to bring them down.

The moose's head over the fireplace is still wearing his headphones after our neighbour, Sam, called around last night. The moose would rather listen to The Stone Roses than hear any more of Sam's theories. He believes that God is a puppet master. He'd like to be able to cut the strings, but he's afraid he'll cut the one holding up the sword of Damocles. He blames God for all of his mistakes. If God is responsible, I think it's more like a ventriloquism act, where the dummy, in this case Sam, says things that embarrass the ventriloquist. Why else would God make his creation get his head stuck in a bucket or touch wires to see if they're live.