Mrs. Dulfearth's Matilda

Some leaves are starting to fall from the trees. I can't think of a better way to clear my head than to look at the leaves being carried by the breeze. My great-grandfather used to clear some room in his head by listening to the wind with his good ear. The wind would emerge from the other ear, having cleared away all the rubbish scattered on the floor of his brain. Sometimes he needed the space to remember directions or where he hid his honey.

My cousin Jane was standing on the river bank one day with her friend, Claudia. They were looking at the ducks. Jane said, "I keep thinking that one of my feet is moving away when I'm standing still. I'm afraid it's getting ready to run away. Or hop."

"You should go to see someone about that," Claudia said.

"Who could I see?"

"I don't know. What about Stan?"

Stan worked in a bakery. They went to see him and they told him about Jane's foot. His response was to stare blankly back at them.

"It doesn't matter," Claudia said. "I just thought she should see someone about it."

"Maybe she should see someone else."

"Like who?"

"Almost anyone. Who couldn't you see -- that's a much more interesting question. My aunt couldn't see my uncle for over three months, even though everyone else could see him. Sometimes I can see the woman who works in the shop and sometimes I can't. She took me to an old oak tree to see if I could see her there."

"And could you?"

"I could, but not very clearly."

"I wish I had an interesting affliction like that."

"It's not an affliction. It isn't my fault I can't see her. It's hers."

"Well I wish I had an affliction like the one she has."

"Mrs. Dulfearth hasn't been able to see me in years. I dance in front of her and she looks right through me."

After he finished work that evening, Stan took them to see Mrs. Dulfearth. She saw Jane and Claudia, but not Stan. While he was performing a tap dance she was saying this: "I've been cementing my whistling. Is that your leg? My lone head can't keep me entertained when I'm stuck in an unfunny night. I gave him some peas and he took them to another woman. I had no idea who this other woman was, apart from the fact that she wasn't me. I tried to form a mental image of her. All I could see was a woman who wasn't me, and not being me she had terrible hair. 'What a funny-looking person,' I thought. 'I think I'll call you Matilda, and you'll always be scratching your ears because your ears will always be itchy.' When I finally met this other woman I saw that she was nothing like Matilda, as far away from Matilda as Matilda is from me, but she's nothing like me either. I have to say I took it badly at first. I found someone to fill the role of Matilda, and that cheered me up a bit. I could say to her, 'Your interest in steam will be your downfall, Matilda.' Or, 'I think there's something wrong with that dog's stones, Matilda.' When she sings 'Baa baa birthday cake, have you any wool?' you shouldn't assume that the answer is no. I've often used her at parties when I've needed someone to point at. If you've ever been stuck for something to say to Mr. Hammerkofferliss when he says he wants to be a monk, you'll know just how valuable it is to have a Matilda. You can say to her, 'Say that thing you said about spinning around.' She'll smile and she'll repeat what she said. She'll say it much quicker this time because she's had the practise of saying it before, but it'll still take her over half an hour to complete it. You won't have to say anything to Mr. Hammerkofferliss and he won't have anything to say to you. I had my Matilda with me one evening when I was walking down the road. We passed a house where a man was buttering his windows. I was able to send the Matilda in to ask him where he got the butter, while I remained outside on the road, thus avoiding any embarrassment caused by asking a man about his window butter. I took her to a party once. Mrs. Biddentap said she had a wonderful time at her Aunt Kevin's party, even though her lanky nephew ate too many sandwiches. The room went silent. You could hear a pin drop on a dead badger. I always thought there was something a bit iffy about her lanky nephew. The silence was filled by Matilda, who started singing. I had no idea she had such a beautiful voice. A man called Hubert was there, and he fell in love with Matilda after hearing her sing. Hubert doesn't get on with a man called Raymond. They're deadly rivals. They'll fight over a cloud in the sky or a raison on the ground. Raymond couldn't come to that party because there was a problem with his biscuits, but he came to my party on the following week. Everyone came because they all wanted to hear Matilda sing. Raymond didn't fall in love with her after she sang her song, but when he found out that Hubert was in love with her he realised that he did love her after all. They've been fighting over her ever since, but she doesn't seem to take much notice of them."

Claudia's father organised the re-enactment of a battle. He needed someone to sing the national anthem. A man called Stoat Killarney was usually hired to sing the national anthem at local events, but he couldn't make it because the last time he performed in public something crawled out of his ear as he sang. When he got home he sang for five hours to flush out anything else that might be living in his head. When he woke in the morning he'd lost his voice.

So they needed someone else to sing the national anthem, and Claudia thought of Matilda. Claudia and Jane went to see Mrs. Dulfearth. "Can we borrow your Matilda?" Claudia said to her.

"By all means, as long as you bring her back at dinner time."

They took Matilda to the field where the battle was being re-enacted. As soon as she started singing, Hubert and Raymond pushed their way to the front so they could lead the applause at the end. When they got to the front they tried to push each other out of the way. Pushing and shoving became punching and kicking. Other people joined in, and the re-enactment of the battle began before the national anthem was finished. This happened at almost every re-enactment.

Matilda wasn't put off by the fight right in front of her. This is when Jane and Claudia realised that she couldn't see Hubert or Raymond. Jane explained this to them later.

They both knew that if they were to win her heart they'd have to be seen by her, and she'd be more likely to fall for whoever she saw first.

Hubert wore a three-foot-tall top hat with holes in it for birds. There was a nest in it. He walked back and forth in front of her as the birds flew in and out of his hat, but Matilda took no notice.

Raymond got his cousin's jazz band to follow him around. They played a song called 'Smelly Whale' that frightened all the dogs for miles around, but Matilda kept looking at a butterfly and smiling to herself.

Hubert wore his black wings with the top hat. This gave him a wing-span of fifteen feet. He attempted to fly, but still she took no notice of him.

She finally saw Hubert when he dropped a cornflake on the ground. She said hello to him. He was so shocked he stumbled backwards, fell over a rock, rolled three times, sprang to his feet and staggered into a wheelbarrow full of manure, which he knocked over. She didn't see any of this, but she saw him again when he went up to her and asked if she'd like to go to the theatre to see a play about a caveman learning Spanish. When she said yes he managed to contain his excitement. He let it out later when he shouted at his feet.

The moose's head over the fireplace correctly predicted that Tyrone would beat Kerry in the football final on Sunday. The wife's uncle backed Tyrone because of this prediction. He used his winnings to buy a set of silver spoons. Now he just needs to learn how to play them. There's a man in the pub who can play all of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos on the spoons.

Gold

I have so many vivid memories of hot summer days. I've made no lodgements in that memory bank this year, but I have accumulated many memories of looking at the rain from inside the glasshouse, or watching the rain drops roll down the window pane. The wife's aunt says she's never seen a film that's more interesting than watching windscreen wipers going back and forth in the rain. This is really just a reflection of how much she loves looking at windscreen wipers, rather than how much she hates films.

My uncle Ben often went to the local pub in the evening. A man called Paul was always there, and Ben always had the same conversation with him. Ben would say, "Have you found any more mummies?"

"One or two," Paul would say.

"Have you taken any more eyes from mummies?"

"A couple."

"Do you keep them in a jar or a box or a bag?"

"In a chocolate box. A box of chocolates. And eyes."

"Is your wife still afraid of frogs?"

"She is."

"And how's her leg?"

"Still hanging on."

"And how's her mother?"

"Hanging on."

"And is her brother still stealing the fish?"

"There's no stopping him since he got his elbow fixed."

"What happens if they want their eyes back?"

"I tell them to feck off."

But one day it was different. Ben asked about the mummies and Paul said, "No. I found Dave. He's listening to his spiders."

It had been nearly two years since they'd last met Dave or his friend, Andy. Dave and Andy used to come into the pub every night, until they disappeared. There had been a few sightings of them in remote places, in the woods or on the side of a mountain, but no one had spoken to them.

According to Paul, Dave was in a shed in the woods. When Ben and Paul went to see him he was still looking at his spiders because he found it relaxing. Ben asked him why he needed to relax and he said, "I need to forget about the gold. It'll drive me mad if I think about it anymore. I've been obsessed with it for two years now, thinking about it every minute of the day, even when I was asleep. Some people would say I've already gone mad, but the spiders assure me I'm sane."

He told them about how himself and Andy had been out looking for eggs one day when they found gold on the bank of a stream. The fact that they had been looking for eggs at the time coloured their perception of the gold. They were convinced that an animal must have laid the gold, and they tried to find this animal rather than search for more gold.

On a map they marked the spot where they made their find. They searched the surrounding area for more gold, hoping to make a map of the animal's movements. They spent many weeks searching the wilderness, sleeping under the stars. One evening they caught their dinner in the river. Or at least they caught the means to make their dinner. They pulled a naked chef out of the water and they told him to put some clothes on and make something to eat. Dave once said that to a woman and she tried to set him on fire. "She chose the wrong big toe," he said. "That one will never burn. It's as hard as a rock. She was trying to get it to light for hours."

The chef made their meals for the next week, but then one morning they woke up and he was gone, and so was their map. It was only then they realised that they should have been looking for more gold at the stream rather than looking for an animal, and that the chef had probably made this realisation.

Ever since then they'd been looking for the stream, but they couldn't find it.

When Dave finished telling his tale, Ben said to him, "Have you ever thought about looking for the chef, rather than looking for the stream?"

"No, I don't think I have thought of that." He asked his spiders if he'd thought of that, just to make sure. They insisted that this thought had never entered his mind while they were on guard.

"If we find the chef," Ben said, "we'll find the gold as well, assuming he's found whatever gold was there. And you can reclaim what's rightfully yours, because he stole the map."

"We'll have to go and get Andy first. He deserves his share too. He's back in his junkyard now. And if ye help me find the chef, ye can have a share of whatever we shake out of him."

They went to Andy's junkyard. They found him there with a woman. They were pointing at each other. She was pointing at his nose, and this is why she failed to notice that he was wearing a pointy hat with a D on it. He was pointing at her pointing finger, and he completely forgot who was behind the finger. When Ben said hello he looked away from the finger for a second and he was shocked when he saw who was behind it. "It's you!" he said.

"Who did you think it was?" the woman said. Her name was Cynthia.

"I just forgot."

"You owe me money."

"I don't."

"You do. That moped you sold me caught fire just after I bought it and I want my money back. I've been trying to find you for the past two years."

"I've been here all this time. I think this moped caught fire after you've been burning the guts out of it for the past two years, and now you want your money back."

"I demanded my money back two years ago and you ran away."

"Did I?"

"If you forgot who I was while you were looking at me you wouldn't have much chance of remembering a conversation we had two years ago."

"I wasn't looking at you. I was looking at your finger."

Dave intervened. He said, "There's a way to settle this to everyone's satisfaction. We're going to get what's rightfully ours, and then you'll be able to pay Cynthia with the small change in your pocket."

Dave told Cynthia about the gold and the chef. She suggested that the best way to find the chef would be to ask Mrs. Jopludd, who was the food critic for the local paper.

They went to see her, and Andy described the chef's appearance. "He's a tall man. And he has black hair. That's all I can remember. I tried to avoid looking at him after seeing him without any clothes."

Dave said, "The one thing I remember about him is that he hated rabbits."

"I think I know who you mean," Mrs. Jopludd said. "He has a French name, but I think he's from Cavan. It's not so much a name, more of a sound. It's like the sound my sister made when she sat on a bell. My sister is an extraordinary repository of sounds. If ever I need an interesting sound I go to her and poke her with a knitting needle or with a baguette."

"Do you know where we could find the chef?" Dave said.

"Yes. He opened his own restaurant about a year ago. I took my sister there just to hear the sounds she made as she ate. The menu was full of meat from things that could kill rabbits. I'd have thought that the way to reward things that can kill rabbits would be to avoid eating them. But he's a strange man."

She gave them directions to the restaurant. They went there that evening. They didn't want to go inside in case the chef saw them and recognised Dave and Andy, so they waited until the restaurant closed, hoping to see him leaving the building.

At one o' clock in the morning he still hadn't left. They went around the back of the building, and they saw a light on in a window. When they looked inside they saw the chef sitting at a desk in an office. He was drinking brandy and counting money. There was a gold pen and a gold letter-opener on the desk. The paintings on the walls had gold frames. Everywhere they looked they saw gold.

"We have every right to steal as much of that gold as we can carry," Dave said. "It isn't even stealing. It's retrieving what's rightfully ours."

"I'm glad I brought my crowbar," Andy said. "I'll be able to open this old sash window. I've always been glad I brought my crowbar. It's never once let me down."

Ben said, "He looks perfectly happy with his brandy and his money. Who wouldn't? We could be waiting a long time for him to leave."

"Then we'll need a distraction," Dave said. "One of us will knock on the front door and stall him for a while, and the rest of us will retrieve the gold."

They all agreed that Cynthia was the best person to distract him, and she agreed because she didn't want to break in. She left them, and shortly afterwards they saw the chef leaving the office to see who was at the door.

Andy used his crowbar to open the window. He went inside, followed by Dave, Ben and Paul. They collected the gold pens, letter-openers, statues and some of the paintings, but before they left the office, the door opened and a gun entered. The gun was followed closely by the chef, who was followed by Cynthia.

Cynthia and the chef both looked dishevelled. He found it impossible to avoid having affairs with women he'd only just met. Five minutes after meeting them he'd sigh and say, "Have we had an affair yet?"

He didn't want to do it, but there was an inevitability to it. Women couldn't resist him. When he met Cynthia it took less than a minute for them to surrender to fate, but they were interrupted when he heard a sound from his office.

When he saw Dave and Andy in the office he smiled and said, "I never thought I'd see this outside a dream. The two of ye in a confined space and me with a gun."

"Why do you want to shoot us?" Dave said.

"Because ye're idiots."

"You stole our gold," Andy said.

"I stole nothing. Apart from the map. But that map stole months of my life. I spent months looking for gold, but I found nothing."

"What about all the gold in here?"

"None of it is real. This restaurant used to be owned by a man who decorated the office like this because he thought that this is how James Bond's office would look. I'll make a deal with ye. I won't shoot ye if ye take all this crap away with ye."

"You stole two years of our lives," Dave said. "If we're going to take all this crap away with us, then we deserve to take the cash away with us too."

"That sounds fair enough. Ye can take all this crap and the cash, but I do get to shoot ye."

While Dave and Andy were considering this, Cynthia said, "There's one other factor that we shouldn't overlook. I couldn't help noticing that photo of you on your desk. I'm guessing that the woman with you is your wife. You look like a groom and she has an unmistakable bridal look in her wedding dress. It would be a terrible shame if she found out about what you get up to with women who stop at the restaurant late at night."

He agreed to let them leave with the cash, as long as Cynthia stayed behind for another few minutes.

The moose's head over the fireplace has been doing his best to look contemptuous, just to match the expression of contempt on the face of my great-great-grandfather, whose portrait is hanging on the wall opposite the fireplace. I found the portrait in the attic. He used to count the holes in his head every morning and if he had one too many he'd put a cork in one of the holes. This is why he has a cork up his nose in the portrait.

Mrs. Dogwund's Cat

The nights are closing in again. The sight of the moon and the stars on a clear winter night is something to look forward to. One of our neighbours says he's going to the moon in December. He'll be wearing a red hat, if you want to keep an eye out for him.

My cousin June's kids, Daisy and Graham, often to go see their neighbour, Mrs. Wigbuttle. They bring their pet duck, Sleepy, because he likes looking at her. They never know what she'll be doing. The last time they went to visit her she was telling a tree to remove its leaves from her lawn.

When they arrived at her place she was standing on her newspaper so it wouldn't blow away in the wind, but she couldn't read the bits beneath her feet. She tried wearing sandals, but she forgot that her feet weren't transparent.

"Have you ever tried standing on leaves?" Daisy said to her.

"I would find that catastrophically boring," Mrs. Wigbuttle said.

"I thought you were going to say 'I would find that cat'."

"I did say that, and I added 'astrophically boring'."

"I once met an astronomically boring cat. All he ever did was stare at his own reflection. I think he was waiting for it to do something. My reflection did something once, and then I did what it did, just in case it got scared."

"Being bored isn't a catastrophe," Graham said. "Sometimes I like being bored. It's better than spending an hour kicking a wheelbarrow."

"I can show ye a cat who keeps following his owner," Mrs. Wigbuttle said. "It's not as difficult as it sounds, because the owner is Barney and he spends a lot of time standing still so he can think. I saw him standing in a field this morning, so he's probably still there now."

They went to the tree and Barney was still there. His cat was asleep in the grass a few yards behind him. Barney is a tall, thin man with a long face. He can do a good impression of a vertical line. He often does his impression of a horizontal line too, although most lines don't leak as much as he does. In a strong wind he can do a line at a forty-five degree angle.

Mrs. Wigbuttle asked him what he was thinking about and he said, "I was thinking about my cousin Kevin. He fights fire with his fists. He hasn't won yet."

"What happened your shoes?" Mrs. Wigbuttle said.

"They were invaded by my feet."

"I thought they were a different colour."

When he looked down he got a shock. "These aren't my shoes at all," he said. "I haven't looked at them in weeks -- I was planning on looking at them again next week -- but these look much older than mine, and they're a different colour too. They couldn't have aged as much as that and changed colour since I last looked at them."

"Maybe the lemon lady took them," Mrs. Wigbuttle said.

"You accuse the lemon lady of stealing everything just because she said your hens had diarrhoea. I don't think she meant that as an insult."

"If it wasn't the lemon lady, who was it?"

"Just because I don't know who stole my shoes, it doesn't mean that the culprit must be the lemon lady. I should have seen this coming. The plumber kept smelling my cat the other day. I knew it was an omen of something bad to come my way, but I had no idea it would involve my shoes. And I'm sure I had my own shoes then because I looked down rather than look at him smelling the cat."

Graham said, "Why not let Sleepy sniff those shoes and he'll track down who really owns them. He once found my sandwich."

"I'm not letting a duck sniff the shoes I'm wearing. It's demeaning. If it was a dog, maybe. But not a duck."

Daisy distracted him by pointing at the cat and saying, "Your cat is crying."

When Barney turned around, Graham tried to get Sleepy to sniff Barney's shoes, but Sleepy just fell asleep. Barney was angry when he figured out what they were up to. Graham said, "There's no point in complaining. Sleepy has the scent now."

"What's he going to do with it?"

"All will be revealed when he wakes. His brain works quicker when he's asleep."

"I can relate to that. My brain works quicker when I'm standing still."

They waited for nearly an hour, and Sleepy finally woke when Mrs. Dogwund's niece arrived. She looked down at her feet and then up at the clouds and then she whistled a tune before coughing and saying to Barney, "Mrs. Dogwund has something she'd like to say to your neck."

They all went to see Mrs. Dogwund, who looked down at the ground, swayed from side to side, sang a line from a song, sniffed a flower and then she said to Barney, "It's about your shoes. When I met you last week my cat was fascinated by your shoes. You didn't notice because you were thinking about strawberry jam. I'd have loved to have stayed there thinking about it with you but I had to go away to meet my sister to discuss the thing that's eating her cabbages. I had to drag her away. My cat, not my sister. My cat normally likes being dragged away, but she seemed so sad. My sister doesn't like being dragged away. My cat was still sad on the following day, and I could tell that she was missing the shoes. And then one evening I saw your feet sticking out of a barrel outside the pub, and your shoes were on your feet. In a moment of weakness I took them, but I've felt guilty about it ever since. I'd like to return them now. If my cat is going to be sad, so be it."

"My cat sleeps on my shoes," Barney said. "They'd still be attached to my feet at the time. Maybe your cat just likes the smell of my cat."

Barney introduced his cat to Mrs. Dogwund's cat. They just stared at each other.

"She seems so happy now," Mrs. Dogwund said. "You must come to visit every day and bring your cat to meet my cat so they can delight in each other's company."

Barney just stared at her. She could tell he was happy.

When Barney visited Mrs. Dogwund he just stood there thinking about time or gay snowmen, but she enjoyed his company.

The moose's head over the fireplace has a good sense of smell, but unfortunately he can't use it to locate missing shoes or missing people. The wife's uncle says he knows a man who's always buying new shoes because his old shoes keep going missing. He gets the new shoes to sniff his socks and then track down the old ones, but the smell often knocks them out. It takes them a few weeks to get used to it, and then they just take their first chance of escape.

Cyril's Cow

This pale imitation of summer is starting to resemble autumn. People say that my imitation of Nelson Mandela is a lot like Sylvester Stallone.

My uncle Cyril once bought a litre of milk in the local shop and he found a dead fly in it. He took both the fly and the milk back to the shop and he demanded a refund. The man who owned the shop said, "The fly must have flown into the milk just after you opened it."

"The fly came out of the milk just after I opened it. He was dead, and he'd been dead for some time."

"It sounds as if you've performed a post mortem on this fly. You must have looked very closely to see that it's a 'he'. Is that what you normally do to flies?"

"Is it normal for your milk to have dead flies in it?"

"It's not 'my' milk. I've never produced milk in my life. You can have a closer look at my apparatus to see for yourself."

Cyril left the shop as the owner was opening his shirt. On his way out, Cyril said he'd never buy milk there again.

He bought a cow to provide the milk. He had to buy a huge amount of cornflakes because the cow refused to eat grass. She also refused to drink her own milk with the cornflakes, so he ended up buying more milk than ever, and he had to drive to another shop to get it. He had to drink her milk, but it wasn't as nice as the milk from the shop. He experimented with her diet to see if he could improve the taste of the milk, and he found that it was just about bearable when he fed her smoked salmon.

His experiments branched out to other areas. He read bedtime stories to the cow and he performed puppet shows for her. He dressed as Julius Caesar and read speeches. Some of these things brought slight changes to the quality of the milk, but he found that there was a significant improvement after the cow heard his neighbour, Nora, singing a song about the summer. Cyril started selling the milk to the neighbours, and they loved it. Some of them became addicted to it.

Cyril was making a lot of money from the milk, but it all went wrong when Nora started singing sad songs. The milk went bad, and the people who were addicted to it nearly went mad. Cyril tried to convince Nora to sing happy songs again, but she said she couldn't because she'd never feel happy again. It was because of a prediction by a man called Logan.

Logan believed he could tell the future by looking carefully at the weather. He was useless at predicting the weather. He'd stand in a field and try to take it all in, listening to the wind and looking at where it went to. He saw it as a puppy running through the fields, or sometimes just chasing its own tail. His predictions often involved a dog. Nora heard him give the following prediction: "A grey-eared dog will come and a limping man will soon follow."

She had just seen the dog. She knew that the limping man wouldn't be too far behind, and she knew who he was. It was Andrew, her fiance. He was always leaving and returning a few months later. Every time he drifted back into her life he brought havoc, but she struggled to resist him. He'd been gone for nearly a year and she was starting to think she'd finally be able to break free from him, but when she saw the grey-eared dog she knew she couldn't. He'd get drunk every night and get into fights. He'd sleep in ditches or on top of whatever he fell onto. He once slept on a stuffed alligator.

Cyril was desperate to get her singing happy songs again. He knew that he'd have to convince Andrew to turn over a new leaf if she was ever to be happy again. The only way Andrew would change would be if he thought there was a chance he'd lose her, and the only way he'd think this would be if he thought she had fallen in love with someone else. So Cyril got another man to pretend to be in love with Nora. This other man needed to be big and strong so Andrew wouldn't beat him up. Cyril chose a man called Rick, who used to be a hammer thrower. He started out throwing sledge hammers at vans. An athletics coach channelled this hobby in a more fruitful direction. He only went back to throwing things at vans when someone accused him of using performance-enhancing drugs. When he started using his face as a notice board it probably had something to do with drugs, but they wouldn't have enhanced his performance. If anything, the bits of paper stuck to his face would have distracted him during his throws.

Andrew arrived back three days after Nora saw the dog. He had been all around the world on a ship. He brought back blue sugar for her dog, and for her he brought the feathers of endangered species.

When he saw her with Rick he was shocked. He didn't know what to do. His plan of action for most situations involved breaking a chair over another man's back, but it wouldn't be wise to do that to Rick.

Cyril found Andrew sitting at the side of the road. He told Andrew he was going to help him win back Nora's heart. A make-over was needed. They went to a barber first, and then they went to get Andrew a new suit.

When the physical transformation was complete, Cyril took Andrew to see a man known as Tree. He was at peace with the world, and women seemed to love that. He regarded the interaction with other people as a martial art. He believed that he'd never have to use violence on anyone because his soul had reached a level of enlightenment that placed him above the people he interacted with. It would have taken Andrew years to reach this level, so Tree thought it would be dangerous to teach his martial art. Instead he focussed on fostering a sense of peace.

Andrew got the impression that Tree had learnt most of his teaching methods from watching Karate Kid. He painted the fence around Tree's house, but he didn't complain because he got some very good advice on how to behave around women. Tree told him you didn't need to say very much to them. What was left unsaid was just as important as what was said, and the way you didn't say things mattered too. It was also important to listen.

While Andrew's re-education was taking place, Nora's songs to the cows were becoming much more upbeat again, and the milk was improving. At first Cyril thought that her return to form was due to the prospect of having a new and improved Andrew, but then he started to see the truth. She was falling in love with Rick.

Cyril was afraid that Andrew would find out who brought Nora and Rick together. Cyril wasn't big enough to make Andrew think twice about breaking a chair over his back. But if he acted to break up Nora and Rick's new relationship he'd always be afraid that Rick would find out.

It was Rick's tendency to break chairs over the backs of other men that saved the day. He got into a fight with a man in the pub. It started over a disagreement about a fingernail in a glass. The other man had an unfair advantage in the fight: he had a twin brother, and they were both huge. Rick had to leave town for his own safety.

Andrew was there to fill his shoes. At first Nora did a good job of not talking to him. And the way she didn't say things suggested that what was unsaid would have to be bleeped out if she said it. But her resistance was broken down by a song he wrote for her. He knew how much she loved singing so he thought this would be the best way to win her back, and he was right. He sang the song for her and performed a dance routine. The song included the following lines: 'I love your face, I love your head. I'm sorry I blew up your shed'.

Nora was happier than ever, but the cow's milk was worse than ever because Andrew always sang with her. Cyril understood the cow's mind, and he was sure that she'd find Andrew's dance routines disturbing.

The moose's head over the fireplace has never been disturbed by a dance routine, but he's found some of them slightly unsettling, like when the wife's aunt performed a two-hour dance that represented her battle with a bee in a bottle and a Norwegian sailor who was dazed after being hit on the head with the leg of a grand piano.