Summertime, and the cricket is easy

Today is supposed to be the hottest day of the year so far.

It certainly feels like it. I have made sure that I have derived maximum enjoyment from it by sitting indoors in the shade, sipping cool drinks and listening to Test Match Special. Something of a cliché? Possibly, but I recall that in the hot summers of my youth, the cricket was the background to whatever else was happening. Cricket is criticised because it takes five days to play a match, but surely that’s one of the many great things about it. Doing anything properly; building a cathedral, erecting a henge, singing a German opera, takes time. Things that are less impressive – instant coffee, Pot Noodle, eating anything that is ‘fun’ sized is less satisfying.

A colleague recently asked me if we weren’t in fact seeing a return to ‘proper’ weather, like wot we ad when we were kids! They have a point. Winter actually came with snow. Real, proper fluffy white snow rather than the brown slush we’ve been putting up with that insinuates itself into your shoes and, for some science-defying reason, never melts once it’s in there!

Now we have the sort of summer that’s turning the lawns the same shade of brown as the faded poleroids that document the last time we had a summer like this. I foresee hosepipe bans and brown lawns for everyone except the Midnight Waterer who is bright enough to realise that he’s not supposed to be watering his lawn, but not bright enough to realise that somebody in authority might make the connection between a street full of sepia grass and a single lawn of emerald green.

The idea then of climate change actually being caused by nostalgia has been added to the other theories about global warming. What nostalgia will not affect is my dress sense. Judging by those same faded photographs I was a big fan of man-made fibres and spent the summer of ’76 sporting nylon tee shirts decorated with pictures of Action Man. Not a good look on a fat adult.

Haunted household objects

Unless you’re a collector, an enthusiast or a nutter, it’s more than likely that the things that fill your home are a mixture of the essential, the useful and the occasional luxury. If you have extra soft quilted loo paper then you’re covering all three categories there.

If you have a chest of draws full of Barbie dolls still in their boxes then you are collector. If you have a chest of draws full of Barbie doll heads that have been wrenched off their bodies, then you are nutter.

For most folk though ordinary, everyday households are, by and large, filled with ordinary, everyday objects that are, on the whole, fairly innocuous. Occasionally something has the capacity to be odd, creepy or sinister, if you have something that’s antique, or stuffed, or both, then this can often be the case. Folk had a different aesthetic and the Victorians in particular thought that no home was complete without a stuffed raven or a hunting scene diorama. Such items look a little incongruous today when placed on Ikea furniture.

Then there are things that are just too jolly to ever be creepy, like clockwork chickens! What’s not to love?


Paintings though, can be odd, in any number of ways. There’s the portrait where there’s something just not quite right; on the plus side, it may hold the key to a puzzle that will point the way to lost treasure (if you’re lucky it’s a figure pointing to the base of a familiar tree while holding a spade, if you’re unlucky it’s a figure sitting at a chess table which has been set up with a problem, in an unfamiliar landscape, with notes in mirror writing in a foreign language and you just have to hope beyond hope that the painter wasn’t a practical joker). Occasionally of course paintings provide useful places with assassins – with exactly the same eyes as the person in the painting – to lurk behind, peeping and awaiting their pouncing opportunity.

Or the painting of somewhere that turns out to have something of a gruesome history, which you only find out about after you’ve bought it. Or, always my favourite, the painting that actually changes appearance when you’re not looking.






M.R. James combined these to great effect in his short story ‘The mezziotint’. If you thought the scariest thing about buying art was the price tag, think again.

Art, of course, is all about provenance. That creepy washed out sketch on the wall, the one that’s signed ‘Vincent’, that’s worth something. But giving an object an interesting back story can also boost value, and nobody wants any romantic crap – it’s got to be action, adventure or, best of all, horror.

Clocks are another good example of an ordinary object that can, with the twist of a pen, become far more interesting as you note that it has, on more than one occasion, struck thirteen. Grease in the mechanism or something more sinister?

The oddest object I know of? A mass produced camera from the 1930s.


Why? Well, it’s all because of a comic. ‘The Collector’ was a British horror anthology comic that ran for precisely one issue in 1977. The story goes that it was beset with misfortune from the outset. Competing with an already crowded comics scene, not only did a distribution cock up mean that only a few copies made it into the shops (the remainder somehow being delivered to a chicken rendering plant where they were put to a use that is as baffling as it is unappetising), but it was released in the summer of Star Wars, and if your comic didn’t have wookies, robots, glowing swords and space ships, you were toast.

Frankly, an old fart who owned a junk shop making Hitchcock-like appearances in comic strips about haunted, cursed or otherwise macabre objects wasn’t cutting it, and The Collector sank after just one issue.

But not without a trace. The comic came with a free gift – allegedly the very same cursed poker chip that featured in the lead story.

Not long after, gruesome tales started circulating the playgrounds that kids who had been lucky, or unlucky, to get hold of the issue had come to bad ends, just like the owners of the chip in the story. The only thing that kids like doing more than teasing other kids is delivering tales of misfortune about their peers with more relish than you’d find in McTavishe’s House of Condiments.

Not many people remember ‘The Collector’ these days, (it’s unlikely you’ll even find a reference to it on the web) and the only time you’re likely to see an issue is bagged at some comics fair. The copies with the free gift still attached don’t sell well.

As for why this makes the camera creepy? One of the other stories was about an investigator of the paranormal brought in to investigate a mysterious death at a church, where the warden has apparently been scared to death. The investigator, armed with a camera to collect evidence, spends a night in the crypt and is found, the next morning, stone dead, a look of terror on his face. The camera has taken one shot; could it be that a photograph exists of something with the power to kill men with sheer terror. Is there a photograph of the devil himself? The collector isn’t saying.

Spooky enough? Well, the thing is, the story itself is based on a local myth from the area where I grew up. Okay, so I’m sure that just about every postcode with an old building of some sort has a story like that issued by the Department of Tourism. Heritage ghost stories are probably handed out to churches just like anyone with an interest in promoting tourism near a body of water bigger than a puddle can whip up a story about the creature in the lake. If you have a hotel on a moor or heath, it’s a difficult balancing act between making sure there are regular blurred photographs of ‘The Beast’ to intrigue visitors and hoping that nobody recognises that for the last one, you forgot to take Mr Tibbles’s collar off.

Thing is, and a friend of mine picked up a camera, just like the one in the story, at a church fete many years ago.

He’s never opened it but apparently it’s taken one exposure.

So the question I like to tease him with is this: did he buy a camera or did he buy the camera?

Does he have a camera, sitting on a shelf in his shed, that has a photograph of whatever was in that crypt?

He’s fairly pragmatic about it. Apparently he was expecting to pick up an antique, collectable, camera at the fete and flog it on Ebay, netting a tidy profit. Unfortunately the cameras were mass produced, are incredibly hard wearing and, as a result, they go for peanuts on auction sites. What he needs, he assures me, is a rumour that it’s not just a camera, it’s a camera with a story, a camera with a secret.

I asked him: do you really think I’ve got nothing better to do with my time than make up some tosh about a haunted camera and post it on my blog?

Tut.

The wet nose of the law

I've seen enough teevee programmes with titles like 'police, camera, beating', 'cops 'n' cars', or 'you're nicked scum' to know that if an officer asks you something you don't make a run for it and hide in a dustbin (thermal cameras will find you), you don't try and hit the policeman (CS gas) and you don't answer back (taser).

I have also seen a documentary about police dogs. These come in two flavours - Alsatians who do 'crowd control' (a dog is snarling at exactly crotch level - do not antagonise) or the rather dopier sniffer dogs, usually spaniels, who are trained by sniffing out treats and so look wildly happy whenever they find some bloke with semtex or smack down their pants.

However, I love dogs, especially gundogs and spaniels in particular are a family favourite.

Which is why, when I was walking through the station past a half dozen policemen and their sniffer dog, and the dog came up to me with his tail going wildly, my natural reaction was to lean down, ruffle his ears and say 'hello!' In that special 'talking to dogs' voice.

His handler was not amused. Apparently it's not the done thing to fondle an officer's ears when they are on duty, especially as the dog loved it and the tail started doing even faster.

His handler, rightly assuming that I was unlikely to be capable of carrying enough drugs to elicit that sort of response from the dog, growled 'just keep walking' and I strolled off with that 'just patted a dog, feel pretty cheerful' feeling, while pondering if my trousers might have the same chemical signature as crack. Or bacon.

A good look?

Fat face is a store that sells, essentially, surfing inspired apparel for middle aged people who are more likely to surf the internet or the teevee channels than any body of water.

In Ely recently. Appropriate attire in Ely is a farmer’s smock, or the skin of the incomer you’ve killed. This is a resolutely landlocked city in the heart of East Anglia so, the ideal place to locate a shop flogging loud shirts and cargo pants in case you decide to drive for an hour to the coast.

What gives the game away, though, are the sizes. I've seen surfers. Mainly they sit together on their boards, in little clumps, looking out to sea and talking no doubt about waves, cider or pot.

They also have flat stomachs and not a whole lot of fat. While you would think that a low centre of gravity would be an advantage on a surf board, it is obviously incompatible with looking good in a wet suit.

Fat Face sells cargo pants in a size 38 waist. The shop was full of middle aged people mistakenly thinking that they could pull off the shorts and loud shirt look for one more summer.

There comes a time when one has to realise that the correct summer attire is, essentially, a hammock and a pitcher of Pimms - and cargo pants if you must but at least have the good grace to call them 'pirate trousers'.