“DAD’S going to hang a picture,” called our 13-year-old son.
The very words seemed to fill my wife with the same tingle of anticipation that once thrilled the steaming throng when a hapless egg thief was hauled past the chiming padre and onto the scaffold. There, to mounting whoops, gurgles and waving banners, the hooded executioner danced forth to tighten the noose around the miscreant’s scrawny neck.
“More, more,” my wife chorused, as I emerged from the shed carrying the old ladder, the throb of a bruise already darkening my prophetic left thumbnail. “Here’s the hammer,” she said, reaching for the platform on the aluminium steps, where I was trembling like a grandfather clock in an earth tremor.
“You know, I haven’t a head for heights,” I pleaded. For the cause was hopeless indeed. You might as well have asked dear old Aunty Gwladys to split an atom while chiselling back her recalcitrant big toenail in the outside privy. For hanging a picture is a complicated process that requires balance of near balletic precision. You hold the cord to your mad uncle’s framed daubing of the snowy Himalayan peaks with the left hand, while tapping the tack with the right hand. Lamentably, I am an impractical man, incapable of such advanced levels of co-ordination, which, as my long-suffering wife tells her chums, is why I am happier on a tricycle than a bicycle. “Help me down,” I cried, against the whirr of falling tools and the crunch of breaking glass. “I am a martyr to vertigo.”
“Well,” said my wife, the suggestion of cunning briefly clouding the lovely turquoise of her eyes. “That, I fear, is the last we will see of that painting. What a shame! Do you think the council’s thrilling recycling team will be able to turn it into something useful, like a mop handle?”
The forces of science and technology have largely ignored my presence on this ever-advancing earth, though one important discovery did cheer me. After years of research and experimentation, a chap in a white laboratory coat, who would have been described as a boffin in happier times, in recognition of the shine on his nobly domed head, realised why the butter and jam side on the slice of toast, which has just slipped your grip, will always hit the floor first. It is heavier. Indeed, I was witnessing a slice of my own toast somersault from the dry side to the chunky-marmalade side on its descent to the floor, when my wife burst into the kitchen – wide-eyed and pale.
“By Jove,” I said. “The scientists are right about the toast – pushing on that Law of Gravitation proposed by the brilliant Isaac Newton, who had learnt if you stood under an apple tree for long enough, a pippin would drop on your head.”
“Be quiet,” she said. “I have made a far more important discovery. A ghost is living in the attic of our new house!” I should explain that by “new house” she actually meant the quite old house, into which we moved a few weeks ago. Anyway, the evidence for the ghost’s presence could be seen in the cupboard door that now flapped open, though she had fastened it the night before. “He must be living in there,” said my wife, “even though there isn’t a mirror, which is a little strange.”
“But I thought ghosts could pass through doors without recourse to latches and locks,” I replied. “He would simply have floated into the room. It is one of the advantages enjoyed by ghosts over the rest of us – like not having to diet after Christmas.”
“I knew you’d scoff,” said my wife. Then she added that our 13-year-old son had seen a white blob floating around in the hall. “It’s very mysterious,” she mused. “Do you think he is a friendly ghost? Perhaps, we should try and arrange formal introductions over tea and scones.”
“More pertinently,” I said, “will he be any good with a hammer and tacks?”
LISTEN to David Charters on his picture podcast at www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk
