Читать книгу 21st-Century Yokel - Tom Cox - Страница 10

A few of us were sitting around having a chat in my mum and dad’s living room in Nottinghamshire: me, my aunt Mal and uncle Chris, my mum and dad and my cousin Fay. My dad, who was wearing Chris’s jacket, having stolen it from a coat peg in the hall when Chris wasn’t looking, was telling everyone about the area’s annual festive hunt, which was taking place in the fields to the rear of the house. An hour previously, accompanied by a slightly reluctant me, he’d driven three villages east to watch the hunt begin in weather that made your teeth hurt.

‘COME ON! GET IN THE CAR, YOU BIG TWAZZOCK,’ he’d said. ‘I KNOW YOU HATE IT AND I DON’T LIKE WHAT THEY USED TO DO EITHER, BUT THEY HUNT A MAN IN A FOX SUIT NOW, NOT A FOX, AND IT’S REALLY SPECTACULAR WHEN THEY ALL COME OVER THE HILL, JUMPING THE HEDGES.’

‘But it’s the same people who did hunt foxes, before it was banned?’ I asked.

‘NO,’ said my dad. ‘THIS LOT ARE ALL FROM SOCIALIST WORKER MAGAZINE.’

My feeling about fox hunting is this: if you do it, I don’t want to be anywhere near you, let alone in a situation where I might have to speak to you. Recently the prime minister, David Cameron, had been edging worryingly around the subject of re-legalising it, making noises about some kind of compromise which he described as a ‘middle way’. To my mind the only acceptable middle way for fox hunting would be if the foxes were replaced with hungry wolves, hounds were banned and each hunter was forced to hunt alone with his hands tied behind his back. But I make my living from writing about the countryside, which I know means I should take an interest in all sides of it, dark and light. There was, on the surface of things, a mixture of the two here. On the one hand, a man in a furry bright-orange suit, capering around, watched by giggling children. On the other, the parents of these children, dressed in black, some in veils, all in big hats, celebrating the tradition of ripping a wild animal apart for fun. They looked like the guests at Death’s wedding.

I was glad I’d gone with my dad: it took me far out of the arguably oversafe bubble of animal lovers I normally spend time with. Also, the beginning was as explosive as he had promised, a thunder of hooves that reverberated across a dozen fields or more. Even more explosive was the moment five minutes earlier when a man had shouted ‘Loose ’orse!’ and a chestnut mare galloped through the crowd, almost trampling us, chased by two huntsmen.

‘IT WAS FOOKIN’ SPECTACULAR,’ my dad told everyone now, in the living room. ‘WE ALMOST GOT KILLED. YOU SHOULD HAVE COME. TOM DIDN’T LIKE IT AT ALL. I THOUGHT HE WAS GOING TO THROW HIMSELF IN FRONT OF ONE OF THE HORSES AS A PROTEST FOR A MOMENT, LIKE A SUFFRAGETTE. THEY’RE COMING OVER THE BACK FIELDS BY HERE IN A MINUTE. JO! GET THE CAT IN! HE’S ORANGE. THEY MIGHT MISTAKE HIM FOR A FOX.’

The conversation moved on, somehow, to owls. I told my cousin Fay about the noisy tawnies who roosted in the trees behind my house, which reminded her of the time that, upon the birth of her son, who is named Hal, a colleague of his father had sent the family a card which said, ‘Congratulations on the birth of your son, Owl!’ We talked also about Granny Pam, Fay’s dad’s mum, who nobody ever seemed to call Pam, always Granny Pam, and who lived in a high-rise flat in an area of Nottingham later to be even better known for gun crime than many other areas of Nottingham which were known for gun crime. I remember Granny Pam as a long skinny grin in a cloud of cigarette smoke, who – despite barely knowing me – always bought me amazing, imaginative Christmas presents, but Fay explained that Pam had a less-well-known vengeful side too, especially when it came to her parking space outside the flats.

‘She once got mugged and turned round and punched the mugger in the face with her keys inside her fist.’

‘Wow,’ I said.

‘Did I tell you about her lipstick?’ said Fay.

‘No,’ I said.

‘When I was a kid, if ever anyone nicked her parking space, she’d say to me, “Right! Get my lipstick!” Then we’d go outside and, while she put a chain across the space and padlocked the car in, she’d get me to write all over the car using her lipstick.’

I was keen to find out what Fay had written on the cars in question, but she didn’t get the chance to tell me, as the phone rang at this point. My dad picked it up. ‘HELLO?’ he said. ‘FOOK OFF, YOU BASTARD.’ He put the handset down and turned to us. ‘IT WAS ONE OF THOSE BASTARDS YOU GET SOMETIMES.’

Nobody was particularly surprised by this, as everyone in the room had known my dad for at least twenty-six years. He was in typically high spirits this festive season, although to be fair the season itself had little bearing on this. He’d got what he saw as the most indulgent bit of Christmas out of the way with typical alacrity on the morning of the day itself, eagerly shaking a bag next to my mum and me as we opened our presents, then packing the wrapping paper into it ready to be recycled. ‘RIGHT!’ he’d said as my mum carefully finished unwrapping the last of the usual huge mound of gifts she’d received from her friends. ‘LET’S ALL GET BACK TO WORK.’ This was standard behaviour on Christmas Day, at the dawn of which he had greeted me not with ‘MERRY CHRISTMAS’ but the bellowed instruction from his upstairs workroom: ‘THERE ARE SOME CRISPS AND MILK IN THE FRIDGE IF YOU WANT ANY!’ Boxing Day or one of the days immediately following it, such as today, was the time we reserved for getting together with the rest of the family. There’s not a lot of us, and this gathering was a particularly quiet one, as my other cousins, my uncle Paul and my auntie Jayne and Chris’s daughters from his first marriage were all otherwise engaged. The plan was to go on a short walk, for which my dad would be the guide, pointing out landmarks and bringing in stories from his past as a teacher in inner-city Nottingham: the one, for example, about the time he broke up a brawl in the playground and discovered that one of the youths he had separated and now held by the collar was in fact Mike, the head of English, who was not very tall. My dad nipped to the loo before we embarked on the walk. I noticed as he came back through the door that he was holding a piece of toast liberally coated with pesto and salt. I looked at him questioningly. ‘DON’T WORRY,’ he said. ‘I ALREADY HAD IT WHEN I WENT IN THERE.’

When my dad goes on walks or days out, he likes to incorporate a rest into his itinerary, during which he will find a patch of grass on which to lie ritualistically in a starfish position with his eyes closed. Those closest to him are accustomed to this now, but it can be a troubling image for people witnessing it for the first time. This summer Chris and Mal told me about a trip they’d been on with my mum and dad to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, during which some Japanese tourists found my dad lying in a starfish position with his eyes closed and prodded him to check he wasn’t dead. He was probably more tired than usual, having earlier air-boxed with a twelve-foot-tall statue made by the sculptor Tom Price. My mum took a photo of the boxing, on my dad’s request, so it could be added to our family collection of pics of my dad pretending to fight with exhibits on days out, alongside such classics as the time he pretended to wrestle a stuffed hyena at Creswell Crags Museum and Visitor Centre near Worksop. It was unlikely there would be any exhibits with which to stage quasi fights on today’s walk, and, although it provided no absolute guarantee, the icy ground made a starfish sleeping break improbable.

At the back door my dad took off Chris’s coat and returned it to him, enabling Chris to put it on over his sweater, which was thick, fuzzy and light green. ‘YOU LOOK LIKE SOME MOSS,’ my dad told Chris.

As we passed through the porch I noticed that the small African wooden head that usually lived there had fallen to the ground. I had always been nervous around the wooden head, which my mum had purchased from a car boot sale a few years previously. I picked it up and returned it to its perch in the manner of someone holding a segment of something very recently deceased.

I enjoy going to car boot sales with my mum, but because I don’t have her amazing vision, my experience at them often ends up tarred by the brush of anticlimax. When I arrive at a boot sale, full of foolish hope, what I inevitably see is an impenetrable wall of 1990s computer parts and grubby children’s toys. When my mum looks at the same scene, she is able to home in instantly on the one exotic and interesting artefact amid the worthless garbage. ‘I got this for you,’ she said a couple of summers ago, fresh from a boot sale in Lincolnshire, handing me a sharp-ended varnished stick about a foot in length. ‘I don’t like it, but I know you’re quite into weird stuff like that so I thought you might.’

I inspected the stick more closely and realised it was a letter opener, probably made in the early-to-mid-part of the last century. On the blunt end a double-sided Devil’s head had been carved. To be totally honest, I wasn’t sure I liked it either, but it intrigued me all the same, and I thanked my mum and carted it back home to Devon.

Over the next few months I tried to find a comfortable place for the Devil’s head letter opener, but wherever I put it never seemed quite right. I certainly didn’t want it staring at me from on top of the chest of drawers in my bedroom at night as I slept, and when I placed it near my work desk it seemed to send negative messages from its screwed-up wooden eyes. Like all writers, I already have at least one invisible demon telling me that what I do is a load of crud, and I certainly didn’t need a corporeal one joining in and doing the same. By the following year I’d realised that the letter opener had crossed the line separating ‘occult artefact you keep purely due to historical interest’ from ‘seriously freaks me out and needs to leave’. Also, I could argue that its influence had not been a positive one: in the twelve months since I’d got it, I’d contracted a lengthy illness and broken up with my partner. I didn’t think of myself as a particularly superstitious person but whatever move I made next with the letter opener now seemed crucial to my future. However, the process of getting rid of the letter opener wasn’t as easy as you might think. I’m very careful about recycling and I certainly wasn’t just going to shove it in the kitchen bin, while the idea of throwing it into the flames of the fire in my living room gave me visions of vaporous ghouls materialising out of the smoke. I could have just gone and placed it in a field, but what if the crops caught fire the following day, the flames subsequently licking their way up to the associated farmhouse and reducing it to cinders? Lives would be wrecked and I would feel responsible.

Next to my mum’s wooden head though, even the Satanic letter opener seemed of a fairly frivolous and easy-going nature. The wooden head had a monobrow frown that made the countenances of its larger spiritual ancestors on Easter Island look like those of Blue Peter presenters pumped on a home-crafting adrenaline rush. ‘Like’ does not sum up my mum’s initial feelings towards it; she bought it because she found it intriguing and is interested in sculpture and the different historical approaches to it around the globe. For years the head’s home was a crevice between the branches of a willow in the garden, and it lived there for some time in an apparently innocuous and peace-loving way, but in late 2009 my dad fell out of a eucalyptus tree opposite the willow and broke his spine. Upon her return home from the hospital, where the future of my dad as an independently mobile person hung in the balance, my mum noticed that the head’s dark gaze was directed at the exact spot from which he’d fallen.

The years 2008 and 2009 were especially energetic for my dad. In late 2007, after over two decades of doing almost no exercise of a conventionally athletic or sporting nature, he’d made the surprise announcement that he would run in the London Marathon the following spring, dressed in the costume of a superhero directly from his own imagination. He began to train hard, doing circuits around the village cricket pitch, first in a pair of gym shoes three sizes too big for him that he had bought me for school PE eighteen years earlier from the Nottingham footwear seconds shop Jonathan James, then – after a bout of cajoling from my mum and me – in proper modern running shoes that wrapped themselves snugly around his feet. For motivation, he listened to Zairean and Senegalese pop music from the 1960s and Deliverance, the 2003 album by the redneck rapper Bubba Sparxxx. ‘DO YOU WANT TO COME AND WATCH ME RUN ROUND THE FIELD?’ he asked when I visited, standing at the door to the kitchen in tracksuit bottoms and a running shirt stained with brinjal pickle. Not quite sure what I would do to show support as I watched – Clap? Cheer? Fashion a makeshift pompom from some nearby meadow grass? – and feeling a little awkward about it, I declined but later regretted it. The only times I’d seen him run or even been aware of him running since the 1980s had been on the couple of occasions he’d jogged after my car and rapped his knuckles on the window to ask if I had adequately topped up my screenwash. Now, at fifty-eight years of age, he was covering fifteen miles a day, ignoring his doctor’s advice to wear a heart monitor and my mum’s to pace himself more gently.

‘He thinks he’s twenty-six,’ my mum told me. ‘He won’t listen to me. But you know what he’s like. All or nothing. He’s never done anything in moderation in his life.’

My dad’s personal brand of hedonism has never manifested itself in the obvious. His vices are more humdrum than those traditionally associated with high living. In this way he’s very clever. If you try to sit someone down and tell them they’ve got a chutney problem, you’re just going to look like a lunatic. Similarly, it’s unlikely that anyone has successfully staged a salt or orange juice intervention, and I doubt I’d have been the one to break the trend. The risks from excessive running were more obvious, but it seemed churlish to highlight them when he was enjoying himself so much and looking fitter than he had done in years.

My dad has always seemed a little invincible to me. He’s never been subject to the head and stomach aches from which my mum and I often suffered. To my knowledge he has only had two colds in his entire life – although, to be fair, they were also the loudest two I have ever witnessed. Still, twenty-six miles over hard ground was a long way in the sixtieth year of a life that had not been characterised by regular athleticism. I reminded him about Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams, who’d died following a heart attack on a treadmill, arguably because he’d thrust himself vigorously and heedlessly into exercise after a long hiatus. He’d been ten years younger than my dad was now. My dad waved me away. ‘DON’T WORRY. I’M AS FIT AS A FLEA. I DID EIGHTEEN MILES AROUND THE FIELD TODAY. I WAS LISTENING TO SOME TANZANIAN HIP HOP. IT WAS BRILLIANT.’

Our concerns escalated when, with the marathon only a few weeks away, my dad fell off a ladder in the garden while trimming the hedge with petrol-powered clippers. It was early March and he had been dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. The blades of the clippers continued to rotate as he bumped down through the cool air and he was lucky to escape with only a few bruises and two big cuts, neither of which were quite serious enough for stitches.

My dad is a heavy sleeper but also a lively, noisy one who, without warning, in the witching hours will often make an emphatic slumberous statement or break out into shout-mumbled song. During his marathon training his dreams also took on an energetic, high-risk flavour which, with the Big Day approaching, only intensified. A diving header in the FA Cup Final resulted in him bashing his temple on the bedside table and waking up sprawled and dazed on the bedroom floorboards. ‘I wonder if it might be best if I sleep somewhere else until he’s got it out of his system,’ my mum remarked after a high-pressure rugby union game during which she was drop-kicked from one side of the bed to the other. ‘I’M SORRY. I SCORED A TRY IN THAT ONE, AS WELL AS A DROP GOAL,’ he told her. ‘I NEVER USED TO SCORE A TRY IN REAL RUGBY AND NOW I HAVE!’ On the night of my last visit to my parents’ house before the marathon, my dad – tired from a morning of heavy training – fell asleep on the living-room floor part-way through telling two experimentally conjunctive stories about the time that someone cut the elastic off his mittens at primary school and why TV weathermen are nearly all fuckpigs and bastards. I headed in the direction of bed but, upon reaching the stairs, turned back and returned to the living room to move the coffee table a couple of feet further away from his snoring head.

As I drove away from my parents’ house for the final time as a son with a dad who had never run a marathon, my dad jogged after the car as if he had forgotten to give or tell me something important. I wound down the window. ‘WATCH OUT FOR FOOKWITS AND LOONIES,’ he said.

On the day of the marathon I decided not to join my dad for the start in Greenwich, feeling that, as an easily distracted man, he’d be better served by having as few objects and people as possible occupying his attention. Instead I met my mum on the north side of the Thames, near the Embankment, to watch the final stretch of the run. When I finally located her she admitted she was a little cross with him. Earlier, as they’d walked up the hill past Greenwich Observatory towards the place where the marathon would begin, my dad had spotted several people in bibs running across the grass, shouted, ‘OH NO! THEY’RE STARTING!’ and hoofed it away from her, not giving her time to hand him his water bottle, towel or banana. It later transpired that these competitors had been running towards the starting line, not away from it. Only by sheer luck did my mum manage to relocate my dad in the ever-thickening crowd of runners, ten minutes later. He was jogging on the spot and held an open can of the energy drink Red Bull.

‘HI,’ he said. ‘I’VE NEVER HEARD OF THIS STUFF BEFORE, BUT IT’S GREAT. THEY’RE GIVING IT AWAY FOR FREE.’

‘How many of those have you had?’ my mum asked.

‘THIS IS MY FOURTH.’

‘You know what’s in it, don’t you?’

‘NO. WHAT?’

‘Well, lots of caffeine, for starters.’

‘OH.’

My dad, who operates like a permanently caffeinated person and delights in informing anyone from close family to complete strangers that he has ‘BEEN UP SINCE FIVE’, had experienced typically little difficulty rising on marathon morning. At just before 6 a.m. the fire alarm had gone off in the hotel where my parents were staying in north London, and my mum had opened her eyes to see him standing by the window, already fully dressed in his outfit for the day: bright orange cape, black tracksuit bottoms and grey lycra top emblazoned with the orange letters JC, the initials of Johnny Catbiscuit, the crime fighter central to a children’s book he had written recently called Johnny Catbiscuit and the Abominable Snotmen. ‘Oh God. What have you done!?’ my mum asked him.

‘I did feel bad about that,’ she told me later, ‘and I said sorry, but when I heard the alarm my first thought had been that it must have been his fault.’ The hotel’s guests and staff filed out into the car park. Many were still in various forms of nightwear, but my dad was the only one dressed in the uniform of a leftfield superhero.

Now he was in the thick of the action with his kind: other runners in superhero costumes, a couple of Spice Girls, a spavined Spiderman, a man in a gorilla suit with baffling comedy breasts. My mum caught up with him again around about the halfway mark, near Millwall. ‘How did he look?’ I asked. ‘Totally out of it,’ she said. He took longer than we expected to come past the Embankment, and when he did he looked more out of it still. ‘Go on, Johnny!’ spectators shouted, seeing the name on his cape, and he performed for them, spreading his arms wide beneath the fabric as if flying. Judging by his facial expression, it was very possible he believed he was genuinely aloft above the brutalist buildings next to the Thames. ‘Dad!’ I shouted. Realising that there were lots of other dads running too, I modified this to ‘Mick!’ but he could not hear me. In the end I joined in with the masses. ‘Go on, Johnny!’ I hollered, realising that the finishing line was not much more than a mile away, and what had seemed impossible six months ago was going to happen: he was really going to do this.

While my mum and I were waiting for my dad at the Embankment, I’d heard a woman standing to my rear who’d watched a lot of marathons talking about the state competitors get into afterwards. ‘You’d think they’d want to be quiet when they’re that tired,’ she said. ‘But they usually don’t. They talk and talk. They’re on such a high, they can’t stop.’ Sure enough, my dad talked a lot when he’d completed the marathon and, almost nine years later, has still not stopped. In the months directly after his run he discussed his intention of competing again the following year but, heeding my mum’s reservations, eventually decided against it. Nonetheless, he retained his fitness levels with a new zest for horticultural activity, both in his own garden and in the space that my parents’ next-door neighbour Edna had allowed him to use in her garden to grow vegetables. ‘TOM, CAN I HAVE A WORD?’ he said to me during one of my visits to Nottinghamshire. I followed him into the garden and he pointed to a large basket of potatoes he had grown. ‘SEE THESE? YOU’RE GOING TO NEED SOME OF YOUR OWN WHEN IT ALL FALLS TO BITS.’

Benefiting from a new arrangement with the local farmer that allowed him and his friend Phillip to gather wood from much of the nearby land, my dad chopped vast amounts of logs, stacking them in artful circular Holzhaufen formations which allowed the logs at the centre of the pile to cure and dry. Towards the end of the following year, when a eucalyptus – a tree infamous for its rapid growth spurts – began to rocket towards the clouds in can-do fashion and block out the light in the house, my mum suggested that it might be wise to employ a tree surgeon to prune or remove it. ‘DON’T BE RIDICULOUS,’ said my dad, fetching his bowsaw. ‘I’LL DO IT.’ My mum held the ladder as my dad climbed it then the tree itself in old loafers with very little grip to them. The sky filled with rain and my mum said that they should stop and seek shelter. She went back into the house but my dad stayed outside, busying himself with other tasks. ‘You won’t go back up the tree, will you?’ she asked him.

‘NO,’ said my dad.

‘Do you promise?’

‘OF COURSE I WON’T. WHY DON’T YOU BELIEVE ME? IT’S NOT FAIR. YOU’RE ALWAYS TELLING ME OFF.’

Five minutes later my mum glanced out of the bedroom window and saw my dad back up the eucalyptus, balancing on its highest branches in the same smooth-soled loafers, saw in hand, rain streaking against his squinting, determined face. ‘And then I saw him go,’ she told me. ‘I knew it was bad from the moment he hit the ground.’

My dad might have fallen on his front had it not been for the fact that during his descent he was trying to avoid the blade of the falling bowsaw. This caused him to flip over in the air and land hard on his spine. It was half an hour before the paramedics arrived, and during that period he and my mum made a major mistake. Due to the vast amount of pain he was in, he could not stand or crawl properly, but he tried to edge along the ground in tiny increments towards the back door, encouraged by my mum, in order to escape the rain. When you’ve fractured your vertebrae, as my dad had, the one thing you should not try to do is move, as this can sever the spinal column irreparably.

‘I was such an idiot,’ my mum told me. ‘But in my defence it’s very difficult to know when someone is really hurt when they’re as melodramatic as he is. When I give him a haircut and his bare skin touches the back of the chair he yells like he’s been stabbed.’

The paramedics ticked my parents off for their error, loaded my dad into their ambulance then attempted to reverse the vehicle out of the house’s awkwardly shaped driveaway but got stuck. As the morphine the paramedics had given my dad began to kick in, he shouted instructions to the driver, who after several tense minutes got the vehicle pointing in the right direction and on the road to the hospital, several miles away, in Mansfield. Upon arriving and seeing a consultant, my dad was asked if he had any allergies. ‘YEAH, JEREMY CLARKSON,’ he replied.

He would walk again, the doctor said, after my dad had been properly examined, but it was of paramount importance that he stay absolutely still in his hospital bed for a week after the surgery. Strapped to the mattress, he was attended by a very camp male nurse who, every time he caught my dad attempting to move, would slap my dad’s ankles and say, ‘Naughty!’ ‘I WAS OFF MY FACE ON MORPHINE AND THOUGHT KENNETH WILLIAMS AND HATTIE JACQUES WERE GOING TO WALK IN AT ANY MINUTE,’ my dad later recalled.

After the week had elapsed he was told that he would be able to go home as soon as his body brace arrived. A day later the brace had not arrived. He amused himself by asking my mum to photograph him doing an I’m dying! face then instructing her to send the photograph to me. Three days later the brace still had not arrived. The consultant told my dad it would be here soon. ‘IS IT COMING FROM FAR AWAY?’ he asked. ‘LONDON? OR CASABLANCA?’ The consultant said no, that it was here in Mansfield, in a cupboard downstairs, but the man who was supposed to bring it up hadn’t got round to it yet. My dad asked the consultant how much it was setting back the NHS per day to keep him in this bed. The consultant put the figure at around eight hundred pounds. ‘SO YOU’RE SAYING BECAUSE A BLOKE CAN’T BE ARSED TO WALK UPSTAIRS WITH A BACK BRACE IT’S COST THE HOSPITAL TWO THOUSAND FOUR HUNDRED POUNDS?’ The consultant admitted that this was more or less the case. My dad asked for the phone number of the man who was supposed to bring the brace up and called him and said that if the brace didn’t arrive soon he would call the local newspaper and tell them about this fiasco. Four minutes later the man arrived in the room with the brace.

Back home, wearing the brace and severely limited in his movements, my dad admitted that his injury had served as a wake-up call: he’d been trying to do too much for a man of his age. ‘So you’re going to stop chopping logs?’ I asked, when I visited. ‘YEP. NONE OF THAT ANY MORE,’ he replied. ‘CAN YOU GET ME A DRINK? I’M SIXTY. I USED TO DO EVERYTHING FOR MY DAD WHEN HE WAS SIXTY.’ My mum, meanwhile, moved the wooden head from the willow tree to the porch, directing its gaze away from the house and the offending tree, towards the garden hedge. ‘I can’t bring myself to get rid of it,’ she said. ‘I feel like something bad will happen if I do, either to me or somebody else. It’s all nonsense of course. I know I’m being silly.’

My parents’ house is in a shallow, bright valley, and Sunnydale is what it says on the front door. My mum chose the name after talking my dad out of his first choice, Alien Sex Pit. They purchased the place in the uneasy final days of the last century, when people thought computers would set fire to the world. The house’s former owner had died in it on her hundredth birthday: a feat of very specific hanging-on and letting-go that, even though numbers are just numbers, seems a beautiful demonstration of personal willpower, even more so for the fact that it happened only a few weeks before the final curtain of an entire millennium. When my parents first viewed the house no object in it appeared to date from beyond 1958. The building is made from the small red Cafferata bricks synonymous with villages around Newark-on-Trent. The covered, open-sided oak porch is a much later addition by them, along with a third bedroom and the airy downstairs room where my mum paints, sews, prints and sketches. For the five years after my dad’s accident the head remained apparently content in its new home on the wall in the porch. On a wooden rack below it, toads moved in and out of my dad’s old loafers and running shoes, but the head never seemed swayed by their itinerant spirit. For me these five years passed more quickly than any before them: years of final fully entrenched adulthood, unshockable years of muddling along, caring a hell of a lot less about a few things I once did care about and a fair bit more about a lot of things I once didn’t. I imagine they passed more swiftly still for the wooden head, as years probably do when you’re a wooden head carved at an undetermined point in history and of a potentially haunted nature who has lived enough to be surprised by very little. In early 2014 my parents had to have a large part of the house rebuilt on their insurance after discovering that the long-term leaking of a shoddily fitted shower had caused serious structural damage and the roof was in danger of collapsing. This was the latest in a long series of water-based mishaps in the house, including a cracked pipe in 2011 which resulted in a large stain on the living-room ceiling resembling a short but bulbous penis.

‘Do you think this looks rude?’ asked my mum.

‘Not at all,’ I replied.

None of these events affected the wooden head. It continued to stare implacably away from them towards distant fields containing cattle, none of which were struck down during the same period with any significant or mysterious cases of murrain or cowpox. But after its fall from the porch during Christmas 2014 – the Christmas when I accompanied my dad to watch hunters set off to hunt a man dressed as a fox – the head began to get restless and embarked on several other excursions. None of these were very ambitious, usually ending with the head on the flagstones below and never straying beyond the porch’s threshold, but as 2014 became 2015 and 2015 wore on, the head’s tiny holidays became more frequent. My parents would replace it on its perch – always looking away from the house and the now-pollarded eucalyptus – but sometimes by the end of the day it would be back on the ground. A couple of times they found it inside the footwear on the rack below where it lived, including in one of the fateful loafers, which my dad still refused to throw away and continued to wear for lighter gardening tasks. More and more puzzled each time, my parents replaced the head again and again. Its tumbles to the ground were never witnessed by human eyes and occurred not just in high winds but in weather so still that the leaves on the trees in the garden barely vibrated.

My dad’s exercise regime had slowed down by now, marginally. A month after coming out of his back brace he dusted down his axe and began to chop wood again. Then, after going to see the consultant at the hospital and being told that the condition of his fracture had regressed due to his chopping, he stopped. Then, a few weeks after that, he started again and never stopped. He did cease running around the village cricket field but began swimming at the local public pool, making new friends from eclectic walks of life: architects and retired miners and library assistants and bikers and archaeology lecturers and policemen and billboard salesmen. Sometimes while naked and wet my dad would talk to his new friends at such length in the changing room that one of them would bring their towel over and begin to dry him. Just as my phone conversations with my dad would invariably end with him instructing me to ‘WATCH OUT FOR FOOKWITS AND LOONIES’ they would now tend to begin with ‘THIS WEEK AT SWIMMING…’ One week at swimming my dad was discussing a cashpoint in Nottingham which has the statistical reputation of being the scene of more muggings than any other cashpoint in the UK, and his policeman friend, also named Mick, told him that he had taken a statement from a student who’d been mugged down the road from the cashpoint. Not having any cash on him, the student had offered to pay the muggers by cheque. The muggers declined and escorted him back to his flat, stripping it of its most valuable contents. Another week at swimming my dad hid Malcolm’s shoes. Another week at swimming, in late summer that year, when the wooden head’s kamikaze dives from the porch wall were becoming even more frequent, my dad was getting unchanged and noticed that he had a black toenail. He showed the black toenail to Malcolm, who agreed that it was a black toenail.

I winced when my dad showed me the black toenail, remembering the pain I’d experienced when the nail of my thumb turned black in 2008 after I slammed a car door on it. But my dad said he had experienced little to no pain from the black toenail. He couldn’t remember anything he had done to make it black and was told by his doctor not to worry about it and that the nail would fall off naturally when a new translucent one had finished growing beneath it. Presumably it was one of those minor injuries you sustain in the thick of strenuous exercise or physical labour and don’t notice at the time they occur. I get a lot of these myself and currently even had a very slightly bad toe of my own, probably sustained on a steep rocky crevice during a long walk in a thinly populated part of Devon. I have inherited my dad’s toes: long, thick and unintentionally violent. Because of this and the tiny unseen people who live in my house and steal socks in the dead of night, my sock drawer resembles a diverse but unsuccessful sock dating site: socks of every shape and colour, each of them alone, failing to find love. I stub my toes fairly regularly, and my dad stubs his a lot too, and toe length could quite feasibly be a factor in this regularity. Earlier in the year, many weeks before the black nail’s appearance, my dad had stubbed his toe on a table leg in his office then immediately replied to an unsolicited mass email from Boris Johnson with ‘FUCK OFF, BORIS.’ Afterwards he told my mum about the email and – although certainly no fan of Boris Johnson herself – she told him it hadn’t been a very nice thing to do. My dad immediately tramped back upstairs and sent a follow-up email: ‘SORRY ABOUT THAT, BORIS. I OVERREACTED. IT WAS BECAUSE I’D JUST STUBBED MY TOE.’

There was quite a bit of speculation among my dad’s mates at swimming about when the black toenail would fall off. Looking at how precariously it was hanging there on everyone’s last swim before Christmas, Pat and Malcolm suggested that today could be the big day. ‘What if it comes off in the water?’ asked Pat. ‘That wouldn’t be good.’

‘NO, IT WOULDN’T,’ replied my dad. ‘ESPECIALLY IF SOMEONE IS DOING BREASTSTROKE AND HAPPENS TO BE OPENING THEIR MOUTH JUST AS IT FLOATS INTO THEIR PATH.’

The nail, however, had been looking just as precarious for several weeks. I’d been getting little reports of it via text message from my mum. ‘Your dad’s black toenail is looking really bad now: I think it’s about to come off,’ she would tell me, but several days later there it would still be. My dad knew it would hold on for a bit longer still. He loves his early-morning swims and would, I am sure, have been reluctant to jeopardise his relationship with the authorities at the pool by defiling the water. Recently the pool had asked its regulars if they had any suggestions for things they’d like to change about the facilities. My dad came up with the following three:

1. A trompe l’œil panoramic landscape on the bottom of the pool to keep people amused when they were swimming with their heads down.

2. Mirrors on the ceiling, to enable swimmers doing backstroke to see where they were going and not crash into each other.

3. All-over-body airblade dryers for the changing rooms.

So far, there had been no response from the pool.

My parents and I spent that Christmas of 2015 at my house in Devon, where I was playing nurse to one of my cats, who was recovering from two large life-saving operations, having been attacked by a dog. My dad filled their car with several bags of firewood, which he’d very kindly collected for me. I felt bad taking this from him, as he stacked it in such beautiful formations, and I felt even worse when my mum explained the lengths he’d gone to in order to get some of it. ‘He lost a big branch in the river again, like last year,’ she told me. ‘He walked back across the field and asked me to come over and hold his legs for him while he reached over and got it. I’m sixty-five.’ Only just over a month had passed since the last time my dad had fallen into a large body of natural water: a lake in Lincolnshire into which he was dipping a jar in order to get goodies for his new garden wildlife pond.

‘I should have known he would never be a proper grown-up when he asked me to go sledging on our first date,’ said my mum.

After my dad and I had brought the logs in from the car, he went upstairs for a bath, taking the radio with him, and my mum and I attempted to catch up with each other over the booming sound of the Radio 4 News Quiz and my dad’s laughter. Half an hour later, I went upstairs to the toilet and found a trail of bubbles leading across the landing to the spare bedroom. ‘WATCH MY TOENAIL!’ my dad shouted, charging past me and down the stairs, barefoot. A few moments later he could be heard making loud quacking noises at my cats while throwing huge rolls of greasy cooked turkey at them: a treat he’d bought them from Asda the previous day. Afterwards, as he arrived in the living room, I noticed he’d taken his shirt off again. He looked like a man who’d been unexpectedly invited to compete in a wrestling match in the last three minutes.

‘CAN YOU PUT ROLLING NEWS ON THE TELLY FOR ME?’ he asked, handing me the TV remote. I noticed the toenail was still not fully off. It really did look like it was about to detach now, but recent events had told me not to get too excited. It could be months yet.

On the second morning of my parents’ stay I asked my dad if he wanted a cup of tea. My dad has not to my knowledge ever had a cup of tea, but I sometimes ask him if he wants one just to wind him up.

‘NO, I WANT A COFFEE,’ he said. ‘STRONG, WITH A BIT OF COLD WATER SO I DON’T BURN MY OESOPHAGUS. YOU’VE KNOWN ME THIRTY-EIGHT YEARS. YOU SHOULD KNOW THAT BY NOW.’

‘I’m forty,’ I said.

‘YEAH, BUT YOU DIDN’T REALLY KNOW ME FOR THE FIRST TWO YEARS.’

Increasingly, my dad’s visits to my home are about recreating the rituals he enjoys in his own as assiduously as possible: the extravagantly bubbly baths, the loud radio, the bars of chocolate hidden under sofa cushions so – in his own words – ‘THEY ARE FUN TO FIND LATER.’ He also likes to go for an early-morning swim at the friendly local pool, which has an old-fashioned Speedo clock and doesn’t appear to have been redecorated since the seventies. Today being Boxing Day, though, the pool was closed. We’d only got out for a very short walk the previous day, and I knew it would be important to exercise my dad, in much the same way it’s important to exercise a German shepherd, so I suggested that he, my mum and I went for a walk along the seafront at Dawlish. I offered to drive, but he declined and said we’d go in his and my mum’s car. I told my dad that I could easily navigate us to Dawlish from my house, just thirty-five minutes away, but he insisted on using his satnav.

After the female voice on the satnav had directed us down a farm track for the second time in ten minutes, my dad called her a bastard, told her to ‘FOOK OFF’ and permitted me to direct him the final quarter of the way. ‘THIS CAR’S GOT AUTOMATIC BRAKING ON IT,’ he said. ‘IT GIVES ME MORE CHANCE TO WATCH OUT FOR FOOKWITS AND LOONIES.’ As my dad drives, he tells stories from his life, slowing the car down dramatically as he gets to a climactic or highly descriptive point in the narrative, to the frustration of any drivers behind. On this occasion he told a story about an old man who recently went into a skid and flipped his Land Rover over on the main road not far from my parents’ village. A farmer had been first on the scene and, upon helping the old man out of his Land Rover, noticed that the old man’s dog was crushed beneath the vehicle, one floppy ear sticking out heartbreakingly from beneath the bodywork. After he pulled the old man to safety and discovered he was not seriously hurt, the farmer gave him the bad news. ‘I don’t have a dog,’ replied the old man. The farmer and the old man walked back to the Land Rover. ‘That’s just my fur-trapper hat,’ said the old man, pulling the floppy ear and releasing the remainder of the hat from beneath the wreck.

There were no exhibits or statues on the seafront at Dawlish so my dad did not stop to air-box or wrestle as we walked. It was also too cold for him to pause for a spontaneous nap in a starfish position. The stretch of railway line that runs in front of the beach here, where Deepest Devon ends and the cliffs turn red, is the Elizabeth Taylor of train tracks: beautiful but constantly troubled. When you’re on the train, passing along it, you feel like you’re in the sea itself. On a windy day, waves will often crash into and over the side of the train. This had been a rare winter when the sea hadn’t broken the track into bits, causing lengthy closures and replacement bus services. Nonetheless, the wind was fierce, gnashing at our cheeks as we walked west, the waves thudding angrily against the track’s new rocky defences. There were lots of other families walking the footpath but I noticed that, unlike mine, the dads in those families did not periodically shout ‘KEEP AWAY FROM THE EDGE’ as they strolled beside the steep drop to the beach.

‘Have you been to get your bad tooth looked at yet?’ my mum asked me.

‘KEEP AWAY FROM THE EDGE!’ said my dad.

‘I was thinking that bamboo I gave you might be best planted on the far side of the garden – the same side as the oil tank,’ said my mum.

‘KEEP AWAY FROM THE EDGE!’ said my dad.

‘Mick, stop saying, “KEEP AWAY FROM THE EDGE!”’ said my mum. ‘We’re miles away from it.’

‘YOU’RE NOT. LOOK AT TOM. TOM, STOP DOING THAT. YOU COULD FALL IN AND DIE.’

During the drive back to my house my dad asked if I had used my new headtorch yet, a present he’d bought me for Christmas but had delivered to me several weeks early because he was so excited about it. I admitted that I hadn’t and apologised. ‘WHAT?’ he said. ‘I CAN’T BELIEVE IT. USE YOUR HEADTORCH. AND WHAT’S THIS YOUR MUM TOLD ME ABOUT YOU TURNING DOWN THE CHANCE TO GO ON BREAKFAST TELLY?’ I told him I had no interest in ever being on telly, detailing another couple of opportunities I’d turned down in the last six months. ‘I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU. YOU’RE UNFOOOKINGBELIEVABLE. YOU’LL BE BACK WORKING IN TESCO IF YOU’RE NOT CAREFUL.’ The rest of the evening passed quietly, in contrast to the previous time my parents had stayed when, in his sleep at 3 a.m., my dad had shouted, ‘THEY LET ME OUT SOMETIMES, YOU KNOW.’ The next morning he got up early, threw some more cooked meat at the cats and packed the car, ready for the long journey back to Nottinghamshire. My mum checked my dad had not erroneously put any of my possessions in their suitcase, such as the four clean pillowcases he took last time. I felt much as I always do when I’ve seen my parents: tired, ready for a quiet sit-down, but sad to see them go and wishing I saw them more frequently. ‘WOFFAL!’ said my dad, which was the acronym version of ‘WATCH OUT FOR FOOKWITS AND LOONIES!’ that he’d become fond of using lately. ‘WEAR THAT HEADTORCH!’ he added as he and my mum walked to the car. I promised I would and tried to remember where I’d put it. I asked him if his black toenail had fallen off yet and he said it hadn’t. When they arrived home five hours later, the wooden head was on the ground in front of the door.

My dad’s black toenail finally fell off about four weeks later. Over the phone, my mum told me that it had dislodged in the swimming pool changing room, upon which my dad had proudly shown it to all the regulars. ‘Was this before or after his swim?’ I asked. ‘Before, fortunately,’ my mum said. I asked her where the toenail was now and she began to repeat the question to my dad, who was upstairs.

‘IS THAT TOM? TELL HIM TO WOFFAL,’ I heard my dad shout.

‘I don’t need to tell him. I’m sure he can hear you. He wants to know where the toenail is,’ said my mum.

‘IT’S ON A SHELF UP HERE IN MY OFFICE,’ said my dad.

‘Why?’ said my mum.

‘I WANT TO KEEP IT AND GET IT FRAMED. IT CAN BE A MEMENTOE. MEMENTOE! DO YOU GET IT?’ said my dad.

‘Yes,’ said my mum.

My mum told me she had some other, bigger news: they had solved the mystery of why the wooden head kept falling on the ground. ‘You will never guess,’ she said, and she was right. I had turned all the facts over in my head numerous times, and even the most logical conclusions I had drawn – that the head contained the reincarnated spirit of an Egyptian demon from the year 11 BC, for example – seemed wildly improbable.

‘Your dad caught Casper from next door throwing it at the door.’

‘But . . . how?’

‘He kind of scoops it up with his paw then flicks it at the handle. I think he just wants to be let in.’

My mum and dad’s neighbours’ cat, who is all white and named Casper after the famous friendly animated ghost, had been a regular visitor to their house for years. Between 2012 and 2014 he was never happier than with the tongue of my parents’ previous cat, Floyd, deep inside his ear. After Floyd was killed by a car in the autumn of the latter year, Casper began a new love affair with George, a ginger and white stray I had rescued from the mean lanes of Devon then donated to my parents. Casper and George, who bears a startling resemblance to the Belgian international midfielder Kevin De Bruyne, sleep with their limbs entwined at least once every day and gambol about my mum and dad’s garden, playwrestling and chasing one another up trees. Both of them have been neutered, but my mum has walked into upstairs rooms on several occasions to find George taking Casper roughly from behind. Casper is the heavier cat, but it is George who plays the dominant role in their relationship. Casper knows how to be assertive too, though. Before he started asking to be let in by throwing the wooden head at the door he had already worked out how to bang the brass knocker on the door with his paw.

It wasn’t until the beginning of summer that I next visited my mum and dad. The wooden head was on the flagstones near the porch’s entrance when I arrived, its mean, furrowed face staring up at a heavy sky. I took my shoes off but chose not to leave them in the porch beneath the head’s perch. I entered the living room and found Casper sitting upright on the sofa, not unlike a small human. Missing only a remote control and a can of Tennent’s Extra, his pose was one that brought to mind the term ‘catspreading’. He gave me the most casual of glances then continued to watch rolling news. Not finding any sign of my parents in the house, I put my shoes back on and wandered down to their new wildlife pond, which had come on in leaps and bounds since last year. Broad-bodied chaser dragonflies flitted about above the water’s shiny surface, and a little egret belted by overhead. ‘I’M GOING TO GET A SWAN FOR IT,’ my dad had announced when drawing up plans for the pond. ‘Where from?’ I’d asked. ‘I BET YOU CAN GET THEM OFF THE INTERNET,’ he’d replied. He had abandoned this plan, but moorhens, ducks, water beetles, frogs and newts had already arrived on or around the water, of their own volition. My parents had worked tirelessly to transform the space from the remains of an old pigsty into what it was now, my mum referring to their efforts as ‘pondering’. I noticed too that the plants my dad had appropriated from my own pond were thriving.

My pond is a fraction of the size of my mum and dad’s but was full of life in the summers of 2014 and 2015. At the start of this particular spring, the following year, it had become somewhat weed-choked and I’d begun to de-weed it but not got all that far by the time my mum and dad last visited me in March: the one time I’d seen them between now and our Christmas outing to Dawlish. My dad had dipped an arm in to take some specimens for his pond then got a little carried away for the next fifteen minutes. I’d left him to it, said bye and gone off for a walk on Dartmoor. Two hours later a photo popped through onto my phone from my mum, showing my dad in the middle of my pond, topless, up to his waist in water. I returned home to find the pond entirely clear of weed and algae. Tired and keen to relax and refresh myself with a hot bath after my long walk, I thought about what a kind gesture this had been from my dad. The feeling of gratitude lasted all the way to the bathroom, which, upon entering, I discovered now boasted much of the former contents of my pond, and subsequently took me over an hour to clean.

Despite visiting a couple of nearby large bodies of water with a jam jar in an attempt to restock it, my pond had been a bit bland and sleepy since then, so I was excited to see all the buzzing activity in my mum and dad’s. Casper and George had now joined me to watch the hubbub. As they began to do cat kung fu on the water’s edge, I tiptoed out onto a small rocky promontory in an attempt to see a water beetle.

‘DON’T FALL IN!’ said my dad, arriving behind me and almost causing me to fall in.

We walked back up to the house, past a bed full of thriving spinach, a riot of stoned-looking bees on a giant scabious, the stump of the fateful eucalyptus and the wooden head. In the kitchen my dad picked up a piece of rock from on top of the plate cupboard. ‘KNOW WHAT THIS IS?’ he asked.

My dad greeting me after several weeks apart by showing me an obscure object he’d found in the ground near the house was nothing new. Objects he’d found in the ground near the house before included some ancient dog teeth, a sheep skull, a sea of writhing, unusually colourful worms and an extremely bendy courgette. ‘Is it some kind of old-fashioned brick?’ I said, evaluating his latest find.

‘GOOD GUESS. I’M GOING TO TELL YOU EXACTLY WHAT IT IS LATER ON, AND I WANT YOU TO LISTEN. I’VE JUST HAD A BATH AND SWALLOWED A BIG LOAD OF RADOX BUBBLE BATH BY MISTAKE.’

‘Can you not just tell me now?’

‘NO. DO AS YOU’RE TOLD, YOU BIG STREAK OF PISS. I NEED YOU TO SIT DOWN AND I NEED YOUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION.’

My mum arrived in the kitchen and gave me a hello hug. She seemed a little flustered and explained that she’d lost her ticket to a literary event organised by her book group.

‘IT’S BECAUSE OF YOUR CRAZY LIFESTYLE,’ said my dad. ‘YOU’RE WORSE THAN LINDSAY LOHAN.’

Later we sat down for dinner and I talked to my mum about the wooden head. I’d recently found a new home for the Devil-headed letter opener she bought for me – with my friend Jo, who had drained its dark power by keeping it in a pot on her desk alongside several brightly coloured plushies. Now some of the wooden head’s occult strength had been compromised by Casper, I wondered if my mum might finally feel confident about giving it away. She said she’d rather not and that the head still troubled her. I agreed. At this point she turned to my dad, who was wearing a stained orange T-shirt. ‘Mick,’ she asked. ‘Did you know that you’re wearing one of my painting rags?’

We watched the extended Brexit edition of Channel 4 News, and my dad pointed out some politicians he thought were fucking bastards and some other politicians he’d previously thought were just bastards but now thought were fucking bastards too. Then we went into the other room and my dad picked up the piece of stone again. ‘NOW THEN,’ he said. ‘SIT NEXT TO ME. AND LISTEN.’

‘I need to nip to the loo first,’ I said.

‘IT’S ALWAYS THE SAME,’ said my dad. ‘PEOPLE ARE ALWAYS LEAVING ME.’

‘I’ve already been holding it for half an hour just to be polite.’

‘DON’T WEE IN THE TOILET. GO OUTSIDE AND DO IT IN THE BUCKET IN THE SHED. I NEED IT FOR MY COMPOST.’

My dad had found the piece of stone while he was doing what he calls fossicking. This is when, after very heavy rainfall, he walks down to the river to find good firewood that has been washed down it by the flood waters. After picking the stone out of the shallows, he had taken it to the swimming pool to show Pat, whose experience as a mining geologist, my dad thought, might enable him to identify it.

‘You took it to the actual swimming pool?’

‘NO, JUST TO THE CHANGING ROOMS. I FORGOT MY TRUNKS THAT DAY AND HAD TO BORROW SOMEONE’S SPARE ONES. BUT THAT’S NOT WHAT I TOLD THE HAIRDRESSER THE OTHER DAY. I TOLD HER I SWAM NAKED BUT JUST KEPT MY LEGS REALLY TIGHT TOGETHER THE WHOLE TIME.’

‘And what did Pat say about the rock?’

‘HE SAID, “It’s just a bit of limestone, Mick.” BUT I WASN’T SATISFIED WITH THAT. SO I SHOWED IT TO MY FRIEND PHILIP. HE USED TO BE AN ARCHAEOLOGY LECTURER. HE KNOWS ALL SORTS OF THINGS. HE’S SIX FOOT FOUR AND USED TO LIVE IN A THIRTY-TWO-ROOM HOUSE. HE LOOKED AT IT AND TOLD ME IT’S A BIT OF MASONRY THAT WAS MEANT TO BE ON A MEDIEVAL HOUSE. THIS BIT HERE WAS A JAMB, AND THIS BIT WAS MEANT TO GO IN A WINDOW, BUT WHEN THE MASON GOT TO THIS BIT, WHICH IS CALLED AN OOLITH, HE REALISED IT WAS THE WRONG SHAPE AND CHUCKED IT. AND NOW IT’S MINE. EVERYTHING IN THIS WORLD HAS GOT A STORY TO IT. GENGHIS KHAN DIED OF A NOSEBLEED ON HIS WEDDING NIGHT. NOT MANY PEOPLE KNOW THAT. SOME PEOPLE ARE INTERESTED IN OTHER PEOPLE’S STORIES AND SOME PEOPLE AREN’T.’

‘Yeah, that reminds me. I was going to the—’

‘NOW LISTEN CAREFULLY, YOU, BECAUSE THIS LEADS ON TO SOMETHING ELSE. BUT I’VE FORGOTTEN IT NOW BECAUSE YOU’VE TALKED SO MUCH. I’LL HAVE A THINK AND COME BACK TO IT IN A MINUTE.’

My mum and I stepped back outside into the garden. The day had started wet, but now a fuzzy blanket of transparent warmth hung over my mum’s plants. Everything seemed four times as fragrant as it had a few hours ago. The light had almost completely faded, but the stoned bees still clung to the giant scabious in cuddly gangs. Below it were three pots of lager: my mum and dad’s attempt to control the garden’s current slug population. My dad had offered me some of the same lager – which, bought in bulk, worked out at around 20p a can from Asda – and I’d declined. I asked my mum if my dad was still shouting in his sleep.

‘Not as much. But he did wake me up by saying, “A FORTY-HOUR WEEK AT FOUR POUNDS AN HOUR? WHAT’S THAT?” the other night.’

George bounded up behind my mum and me, then cut in front and thwacked his strong tail possessively against our shins. I spotted a metal grass roller, passed down first to my granddad and then my dad, that my great-granddad had made – when? During the 1920s? Thirties? I’d never given it much thought before and now I felt like a short-sighted ingrate for never having done so since clearly this was one of the most amazing and precious things on my life’s periphery. A few yards from it I spotted a familiar steel dish with a duckling pattern moulded into the outside. In it were a few chunks of leftover cat food.

‘I remember that dish!’ I told my mum. ‘Didn’t you used to feed the cat from it when I was a kid?’

‘It was actually your baby dish,’ she said. ‘I use it to feed the hedgehogs cat food now.’

I’d gone through a brief phase a few years earlier when I wanted to get rid of all my possessions and live an entirely unencumbered life. That had changed and, even before it had, I’m not sure I was ever fully down with the idea of getting rid of my books and LPs. I still understand the whole ‘You can’t take it with you’ philosophy but I’m not quite as emphatic about the way I subscribe to it. I know you can’t take it with you but I still wouldn’t mind having a small amount of it, for a bit. I can see how stuff can be a burden, but I like some stuff: stuff that doesn’t boast of its intention to alter your life, but then proceeds to do so in small ways. I’d found a horseshoe on Dartmoor and attached it to my house late the previous year. It’s just an old rusty horseshoe, but I’d be miffed if somebody nicked it. Originally, out of pure unthinking laziness, I hung the horseshoe upside down, and shortly after I fixed it to the large granite bricks on my house a few bad things had happened to me. I’d turned it the other way up a few months ago, and nothing quite as bad had happened to me since. I’m sure the events of my life are not directly connected to a horseshoe from near the village of Didworthy, but there is no way in a million years I’m turning it back the other way up. I related these thoughts to my mum as we strolled around the garden.

‘Your nan used to say that if you hang horseshoes upside down your luck falls out the bottom, but I think it’s nonsense,’ my mum said as, once again, we walked past the wooden African head that my mum did not like but would not part with for fear it would unleash terror on anyone who owned it.

Although we’d only been outside for ten minutes, I felt refreshed. Every time I see my dad, he tells me dozens of great new stories – about Nottinghamshire, about history, about who he is, about who I am – but the narrative is of such a loud and experimental-jazz nature that I get easily tired. The theory has been put forward before by those close to him that my dad does not speak words; he haemorrhages them. I don’t need a long breather from his lectures, but small breaks help, as they would anyone listening to someone holding six conversations at the same time, all on their own. Now, after clearing my head, I was ready again. I sat down in the perfect place to absorb the next part of his story, which would no doubt lead to another, and another. I was keen to find out what else he had to tell me about his new possession.

‘OK, I’m all ears,’ I told him. ‘Go for it.’

But he did not reply, and when I looked more closely at him spread out lengthways on the sofa, I noticed he was fast asleep. He wasn’t speaking or snoring or singing. For the first time that day, he looked totally serene. Beside him on the arm of the sofa was the novel he’d been reading, its spine bent back on itself, like every book he enjoys. Held tight in his arms, like a favourite teddy bear, was the chunk of medieval limestone.