The Astronauts

One of our neighbours spends hours walking through the fields every evening. She loves the cold air. She goes into hibernation during the summer, just for her own safety. She thinks that when enough deck chairs are left outside they'll join forces to become an army, and they'll be even more deadly than the killer bees, although the music of the killer bees can be quite pleasant.

My cousin Gary was in the local shop one day when he met a man called Paudie, who asked Gary if he'd mind getting some jam down from the top shelf. "I'd get it down myself," he said, "but I'm having fierce trouble with my shoulders. It's from punching too many astronauts."

"How many is too many?" Gary said.

"When you reach up to get your 'Foster and Allen' DVD from the shelf and your shoulder hurts, you know you've punched too many astronauts."

"Where do you find so many astronauts to punch?"

"The forest is crawling with them. They've been building their own rocket there for years. They launch it nearly every night. I have to punch them because the wife thinks they're aliens. Punching them keeps her happy. She gets a bit funny every full moon. She'll stare up at the sky and she'll say things like 'The man on the moon looks down on space ships made of honey'. You just have to nod your head and say 'He does' when she says things like that."

Gary went to the woods that night and he found the rocket in the place where Paudie said it would be. He recognised one of the astronauts. It was Eddie, one of his old school friends.

"That's a very impressive rocket," Gary said.

"Thanks," Eddie said. "We've been working on it for nearly three years."

"Does it work?"

"It certainly does. Do you want to have a go?"

"Have a go?"

"Yeah. Be an astronaut."

"Isn't it dangerous?"

"When we started out there was ten of us, and there still is ten of us. Every other team I know have lost one or two over the years."

"How much training is there?"

"You don't need any training to sit down and enjoy the view. We have a space suit and a helmet that will fit you."

Only three could fit in the rocket at any one time, so they took turns at being the astronauts. The rest of the team would be the ground crew. Eddie, Paul and Gary would be the astronauts for this latest mission.

Gary was strapped into his seat in the rocket. It looked just as impressive on the inside. There were lots of buttons, switches, flashing lights and screens. Eddie was in the pilot's seat.

As they prepared for take-off Gary looked out the window. He noticed that the ground crew weren't in any great rush to clear the launch site. They walked over to some plastic bags on the ground and they took out cans of beer. They drank the beer as they watched the rocket take off.

Gary was expecting the rocket to be pointed skywards by the launcher, but it remained in a horizontal position. They took off shortly after Eddie turned the key in the ignition.

Ten seconds into their flight, Gary said, "This is basically just a car, isn't it?"

"The short answer to that is yes. And I suppose the long answer would amount to a yes as well. We spend most of our time working on making it look like a rocket. We realised early on that this was much safer than making it work like a rocket. Them things are dangerous, y' know."

"Cars can be dangerous too," Gary said as Eddie put his foot on the accelerator and they sped down dirt tracks through the woods.

"That's why we have the helmets," Paul said.

Gary was terrified during most of the mission. Just when he was starting to enjoy the ride, they crashed. They were relieved to find that no one was injured, but they were all filled with terror when they realised what they had crashed into. It was a shack owned by a man called Fergus. They had demolished it.

It was very easy to enrage Fergus and engage him in a fight. Sometimes all you had to do was make eye-contact with his good eye. And if he thought you were looking at his bad eye he'd be furious.

They needed to think about this. After a lot of pacing and scratching of heads, Paul eventually came up with an idea. "I know," he said. "We'll put on our thinking caps."

He went into the rocket and he brought out three thinking caps. They took off their helmets and put on the caps. You could tell that they were having some fantastic thoughts by the way they were smiling, apart from Eddie, who looked as if he'd just put the hand of thought into something sticky and smelly.

Fergus would know exactly what to do in this situation. He knew exactly what to do in every situation, but it always involved using his flame thrower.

Paul had another idea: ask Nancy to help them. She was a witch, or she claimed to be a witch, and she lived nearby. They went to her house. There was no light from the windows, and they couldn't see where they were going as they walked though her overgrown garden. When she opened the door the light of a fire flooded out. There was a cauldron over the fire. She said that this had nothing to do with witchcraft. It was part of a religious ceremony, possibly with a political element (at times she wondered if there was a clear dividing line between church and state).

They told her about how they had demolished Fergus's shack. She said, "I know for a fact that Fergus won't be moving for at least another twelve hours."

"How do you know?"

"Because I gave him something for his athlete's foot. He didn't make it as far as the garden gate."

She shone a torch out the front door and they saw him lying unconscious in the long grass of her garden. They had walked over him on the way in. Gary said, "I was going to ask you why the ground was snoring."

"Will it really cure his athlete's foot?" Eddie said.

"Well he certainly won't be troubled by it over the next twelve hours. If he takes the cure twice a day he won't be troubled by it at all."

"In twelve hours we could re-build the shack," Gary said.

"There are lots of DIY and building books in the mobile library," Eddie said. "There aren't many other books in it, but for some reason there are small boxes full of used pencils and screws."

"We don't have time to wait around for the mobile library."

"It's only a few minutes walk away. It's been parked outside the woods for nearly a week."

They went to the mobile library and they found the librarian, Clive, asleep inside it. There were empty bottles on the floor, and they got a strong smell of alcohol. Over the previous week he'd been reading a book written by his girlfriend (it was hand-written). He didn't like the negative way he was portrayed in it, and the positive way she portrayed countless other men.

"I have a better idea," Eddie said. "Clive looks as if it would take a lightning strike to wake him up. We'll drive the library to the shack and make it look as if Clive knocked it down."

"That wouldn't be right," Gary said.

"He loves building things. We could help him re-build the shack. We need his expertise."

Clive didn't wake when Eddie started the ignition. He drove the library bus to the shack, and then they put Clive into the driver's seat. They had to shake him to wake him up. He was shocked to see where he was, and the demolished shack in front of him.

"We saw everything," Eddie said. "You were driving erratically through the woods, and then you crashed into the shack. It's Fergus's shack. But there's no need to worry. He won't be back until tomorrow. You have plenty time to re-build it, and we'll be only too happy to help."

Clive was delighted to have the chance to re-build Fergus's shack. He became immersed in the work because it was a good way to forget about his girlfriend's book. When he finished the shack he started work on an extension that had an attic room above it. A spiral stairs led up to the attic.

Fergus woke in the middle of the work on the extension. Nancy was next to him. She said, "Now you have to take the cure for the other foot."

She had mixed the cure with some whiskey in a glass. She made him drink this, and he slipped into unconsciousness again.

The shack and its new extension were finished by the time Fergus woke up that night. Nancy said to him, "You won't remember anything of what happened over the past twenty-four hours."

"Wasn't I unconscious?" Fergus said.

"You certainly were not. You were full of life. As soon as you drank the cure you took off with a spring in your step. I've seen that happen many times before. People are filled with energy. They come up with all sorts of plans and ideas and they have the energy to put these plans into practise. One man designed and built a miniature golf course, and he had no memory of doing any of it."

Fergus went back to his shack. Gary, Eddie, Paul and Clive followed him to see how he'd react. He looked confused when he saw the new extension. He had no idea why he'd build something like that. It looked like something you'd see on a house make-over show on TV. He was afraid of what was lurking in his subconscious mind. He did the only thing he could think of doing: he got out his flame-thrower and he set the shack on fire.

The rocket's launch site was nearby, and they always kept a few fire extinguishers there. The crew were able to put out the fire, but the shack was badly damaged.

Fergus thanked them for their help. "I've been meaning to start thinking before starting fires," he said. "Burning your house down is rarely the solution to your problems, especially if it's not insured."

"I'll help you re-build it," Clive said. He had been depressed ever since they had finished the extension because his mind was free to think about his girlfriend's book, so he was glad of the chance to start building again. Gary, Eddie and Paul helped as well because they still felt guilty about knocking down the shack and making Clive think he'd done it.

They ended up building a four-room house, and with Fergus's input they were able to make something that he wouldn't want to set on fire.

The moose's head over the fireplace is reading a book, which means I have to stand in front of the fireplace holding the book in front of his eyes. It's a tourist guide book about the locality. My great-grandfather wrote it. I found it in the attic last week. In the first chapter he says that if you come across a man with a donkey's tail you should try to find the man with dynamite in his hand. I often see a man with a donkey's tail in his hand. The tail is attached to a donkey.

Flags

There's a bird in the garden who's making some very strange sounds. One of our neighbours brought her cat around to find the bird, but she's making some even stranger sounds (the neighbour, not the cat). She keeps saying things about cats, such as, "The middle kitten is always the mousiest."

My cousin Albert and his friends, Neil and George, once agreed to do some house-sitting for a man called Blarney, who had to go to his uncle's wedding. His uncle was getting married for the fifth time, but this time he was sure he'd found the love of his life. He met her when she killed some flies on his face. Even though Albert, Neil and George were doing a favour for Blarney, he treated them with contempt. He didn't have any choice in the matter. He had a deep-seated contempt for the whole concept of doing favours for others. He provided two bottles of whiskey for their night in his house. He considered this to be a contemptuous offering, something that a small dog couldn't get drunk on, but it was more than enough for them.

Before they finished the first bottle they were drunk enough to laugh at words like 'shilling' and 'bucket'. But the laughter came to a halt when they heard a noise upstairs. It sounded like a footstep. They crept to the bottom of the stairs and looked up. They saw a white ghostly figure at the top of the stairs, and for a few seconds they were convinced it was a ghost, but then they realised that it was a net curtain lit up by the light of the moon, brought to life by a gentle breeze through an open window.

They were just about to laugh at it when they heard the sound of laughter from outside. A man was looking in at them through the window. He was an artist, and he'd made a sketch to record the moment when they saw the 'ghost'. He'd been drawing them all evening.

He held the sketch up to the glass. They went to the window to get a closer look at it, and they saw that it wasn't very flattering. They were holding onto each other, and there was terror on their faces. And that was so far from the truth, they thought. They had remained calm and collected throughout the experience.

When the artist saw them going to the door he ran away. They chased him through a field, but they couldn't catch up with him, and they didn't want to leave Blarney's house unattended for too long, so they went back.

When they woke in the morning they found an envelope in the letter box. In it there was a photo of the artist standing next to a painting that was based on the sketch. There was a note demanding five-hundred euros for the painting. If they didn't pay, the artist would make sure that all of their friends and family saw it.

They didn't have the money, but they were determined to get it. Albert went on a quiz show called 'Who or What or Ow!'. He thought he had a good nose for things like that. Unfortunately he got electrocuted by his buzzer when he buzzed in to answer the question 'Who discovered Australia?'. His answer was 'A hairdresser'. He achieved a certain amount of fame for this. People were pointing and laughing at him on the street, but looking stupid wasn't as bad as looking cowardly, and he was still determined to find the money for the painting.

He thought he could use his minor celebrity to become an artist. He painted pictures of his shoes, and he took them to a gallery. The owner of the gallery, a woman called Michelle, took him into her office. He noticed the glass cigarettes in a clay ashtray and the painting of an electric blanket, but most of all he noticed her. The songs that screamed in his head were telling him that the lower half of his body was on fire. He didn't bother checking because he couldn't take his eyes off her.

She spent a long time looking at his paintings. She said she liked them, but they weren't really 'in' right now, and she wouldn't be able to sell them.

When Albert was going home on the bus the songs were still playing in his head, but it was as if they were played by a death metal band. He knew he had never felt this strongly about a woman before (actually he had feelings like these every time he saw a beautiful woman), and he also knew she was out of his league.

He got off the bus at a cross-roads. He walked down a quiet, narrow road, and he went past a house owned by a man called Roy, who made flags. He used to cut leaves in half with a scissors and then he'd sew them back together. He thought that even the parent trees couldn't tell which leaves had been cut and which ones hadn't. This is how he practised making his flags.

Albert saw a black flag that had tiny gold, red and blue rabbits on it. The flag was flying in front of Roy's house. Albert didn't know why, but somehow this flag perfectly captured his mood. He bought it from Roy, and he waved it over his head as he walked home.

He was still waving it when he was going past Flora's house. She was a match-maker. She used to work by getting people to eat berries and red sandwiches. I know a man who found his wife through this method. He also got poisoned. Her business had been in decline ever since online dating services became popular, and she'd been looking for a new venture.

She asked Albert why he was waving the flag and he told her about the gallery owner and how the flag represented how he felt. This gave Flora an idea. "I've been thinking about organising speed-dating," she said. "I just need some twist on it, some gimmick. I was trying to think of ways to match people up. If I got them to make a flag or something that represented who they are, then I could match up flags or paintings or pieces of sculpture or whatever. I wouldn't even have to poison them."

"That sounds like a very good idea."

"Will you come along? You've already got the flag."

"No."

"I need people to kick this thing off. If you come along, I'll give you half the profits, seeing as it was your idea, or half your idea."

Albert needed the money to buy the painting, so he agreed. Flora organised the event in a function room over a pub. Albert was planning on waving his flag, taking the money and going home, but he saw a flag that interested him. It was a black flag with blue rabbits who were smoking cigarettes. But when he looked at the woman underneath it, no songs played in his head. There was silence.

She saw his flag and she came over to him. She asked him to dance, but he said he had two left knees. "That's amazing," she said. "So have I."

So he danced with her, and as he got to know her he realised that he had a lot in common with her. He started to hear songs. They were sung by a woman who was trying to play the cello at the same time, at the same time as she was learning how to play the cello, but at least it was something. It was a start.

The moose's head over the fireplace is proudly wearing a Munster flag in his antlers after the rugby match last night. Munster narrowly lost to New Zealand. The wife's uncle says he was there thirty years ago when Munster beat New Zealand, but he also says he spent the late seventies living with Eskimos.

Knowledge

The wife's aunt loves being out in the garden. She claims that one of the garden gnomes keeps lying to her, and she likes being lied to.

My aunt Joyce called around to see her friend Sheila one day. They were talking about Yvonne, another friend of theirs, whose hobby was listening to the laughing bees. She'd try to get the bees stuck to the backs of stamps. She found that they were attracted to stamps with images of flowers. But the weather had been poor that summer and there were very few bees around.

"She seems to be coping well without the bees," Sheila said.

"She seemed to be coping well when she gave up smoking, but then she kicked that bull."

"I suppose we better go to see her to make sure she's okay."

They visited Yvonne's house and they found that she hadn't been coping so well without the bees. She had become obsessed with trying to catch the 'blimp birds' that floated around her back garden. She used nets, but she always missed. Then she tried transfixing them with cigar smoke and music. She hired a jazz band and a cigar-smoker called Ray. The band played slowly in her back garden one evening. The birds perched on the roof of her shed and they watched the cigar smoke assume various shapes as it rose. The music triggered many memories in Yvonne's mind. She stopped caring about catching the birds. The present and the future seemed unimportant. She was happy to languish in the past. She remembered the day her harpsichord teacher got his eye stuck in a bottle (he had been looking into the bottle to see if there was anything left in it) and the time the bishop cried just to make sure his tears hadn't been polluted. She remembered the time she was in a band called The Groundfeathers. Their lead singer, Purrie Newie, used to write songs about his former jobs, from raking cats to stuffing pillows with trousers.

Ray liked listening to her talk about these things. They enjoyed each other's company. It didn't take long for Yvonne to fall in love with him, and she completely forgot about the blimp birds and the bees.

Joyce and Sheila were reassured by this, but then Joyce remembered that Yvonne always does stupid things when she's in love. Yvonne told her not to worry. "I've been measuring the emissions of my emotions," she said, "and so far they're well below danger levels."

As soon as she'd finished saying this they heard a hammering noise coming from upstairs. She told them that she'd hired Jeff to put up new wallpaper in her spare room.

Jeff had once been convinced that the Salmon of Knowledge was in the river that flowed near his house, and that if he caught the fish and ate it he'd be the wisest man in the world. It took him months to catch it. The salmon was huge, but Jeff managed to eat all of it, including the eyes. When he woke up on the following morning his mind was filled with knowledge, but all of it was in German.

He went to German classes, but as he learnt the language he started to realise that this knowledge wasn't what he expected it to be. It was all nonsense. What could he do with aphorisms like 'Never trust the ruindrops with your toes'?

At first he hated having all this nonsense in his head, but after a few weeks he was won over by it. The nonsense affected his behaviour. He started wearing a top hat because he thought it made him look like the mad hatter. Anyone was welcome to join him at his dinner table, which was in a field next to the river. Fish was always on the menu. He'd hold a mallet in his right hand just in case the fish on his plate was still alive. Every so often he'd hammer it to make sure it was dead. He made bombs that were like red screaming hens.

Joyce and Sheila were horrified when Yvonne told them that she'd hired Jeff to put up the wallpaper. They were just about to go upstairs to see how he was getting on when they saw him running down the stairs with some floorboards under his arm. He left through the front door.

They climbed the stairs and went into the spare room. He'd torn down patches of the old wallpaper and painted slogans like 'Trust your screaming ears' and 'Deck the walls with dying dolls'. He'd pulled up some of the floorboards. "I specifically asked him not to do that," Yvonne said.

Joyce thought she could solve this problem. She knew a German woman called Ingrid who could be very convincing when she shouted. They got Ingrid to visit Jeff when he was having his dinner. She shouted commands in German at him, telling him to return to Yvonne's house and finish the job.

He ran back to Yvonne's house. He took the floorboards with him, and he replaced each one of them. Ingrid stayed there to supervise him as he put up the wallpaper. While he worked he told her some of things he'd learnt from the fish, and after hours of listening to him she succumbed to the nonsense. When he finished wallpapering the room they left to see if they could find a priest who'd marry an apple to a shovel.

The moose's head is good at spotting when people are lying. The garden gnomes don't even try to lie to him. But he often believes the stories told by the wife's uncle, including the one about the man who had a wooden heart. He never found love until he sanded the heart, varnished it and pretended it was an antique. Women loved it then.

Dance Classes

There are some beautiful sights to see around the garden at this time of year but there isn't much time to see them because it gets dark so early. There's plenty of time to look at the stars. Even after dark, the local bird-watching club are out in the fields, looking for birds. They only watch drunk birds, so a lot of their time is spent getting birds drunk.

My aunt Bridget and her friend, Anne, were having lunch in a small cafe one day. The walls were decorated with wallpaper that had a very intricate pattern. When they looked closely at it they noticed that there were words in it. Bridget found the start of a paragraph and she followed it all the way to the window. It was an ad for dance classes where you'd learn how to tango and how to levitate. You had to tango very quickly before you'd start levitating, and if you didn't learn to levitate, at least you'd learn how to dance.

There was an address in the ad. Bridget wrote it down, and after they finished their lunch, Bridget and Anne went there. It was an old house near the sea. The grounds were surrounded by trees. The front gate was locked, but they saw a woman walking around the garden inside, and she came over to them.

"My name is Nancy," she said. "How can I help you?"

"We saw an ad for dance classes," Bridget said. "Do we have the right address?"

"It was my grandmother, Julianne, who taught those classes. Some of her former students come here every so often and they teach any new students, but we don't get too many. Come on in and we can ask the secretary when the next class is being held."

Nancy opened the gate and let them in. They walked up a gravel drive, but the gravel was being engulfed by weeds. Nancy told them that the grounds around the house needed a lot of work if they were to be returned to their former glory, but she had no intention of doing anything to them. She liked the glimpse of former glory they offered and the melancholy feeling she got when she thought about a world that was lost to the past. It made the place seem even more isolated. She loved the lonely sound of the seagulls too.

Nancy led them into the house through the front door. On a wall just inside the door there was a portrait of a man in a park. Nancy said, "That's my grandfather in a park in one of the Low Countries. I don't know which one it was. He enjoyed his time in all of them. But he enjoyed the time he spent digging graves as well, so I don't know what that says about the Low Countries, if anything. He also enjoyed borrowing other people's teeth and using them to bite through crayons. He had a box full of crayons he'd bitten. He never knew what to do with them."

The secretary's office was in a room off the hall, but there was a sign on the door that said 'Gone to lunch'. Nancy took them to the kitchen, where the secretary was making tea. She asked them to stay quiet during this operation. She carefully poured the tea into a glass cup. She stopped pouring when the tea reached a blue line, and then she added milk until the contents of the cup rose to a white line.

When she completed this operation she was ready to listen. Nancy asked her when the next dancer would be coming to visit. "I'll have to check in the diary to make sure," the secretary said, "but I think it won't be for another six weeks. If ye're interested in levitation ye could always look at the cat."

"I forgot about the cat," Nancy said. "He'd probably be asleep in the library at this time."

She took them upstairs to the library. The cat was sound asleep above the rug in front of the fireplace. He was about three feet above the rug. Bridget and Anne stared in disbelief. They were afraid to make a sound in case they woke the cat and he fell to the ground. Nancy broke the silence when she opened a small wooden box and said, "Would either of you like a sweet?"

They looked into the box. The sweets all looked like crayons that had been chewed. They both declined the offer.

Bridget has been trying to teach her cat how to dance ever since. He's a poor dance student, but she insists that he once levitated when someone played a very long note on a flute.

The moose's head over the fireplace was once mistaken for a levitating moose. The man who made this mistake had just been explaining to us that the left side of him was drunk and the right side was sober, and that's why he kept falling to his left. When he saw the moose's head he ran away towards an open door, but he veered to his left and he hit the wall.