Mr Snore’s Amazing and Wonderful Puppet Theatre

ee my Granddad through the window? Bent over his home-made petrol-powered pogo stick as he messes around with a spanner? Yeah, that’s my Granddad. I wish he wasn’t but he is.

Let me tell you what’s probably going on in his head at the moment. If I could unzip his skull and scoop out his brain like a big lump of jelly and read his mind, I could tell he’s probably thinking something like, ‘I guess loads of American troops came to England in 1942, but how many of them were dressed up in chicken suits? None of them. Says it all. If I’d have been a little boy waiting on the docks and a ship drew in, and all them Americans came off and not one of them had a chicken suit on, I’d have been well gutted.’

Yeah. That’s the sort of stuff he lives and breathes.

He’s like that – coming out with the most ridiculous demands of people. And that’s what I have to put up with.

You know, way back in the past, when the world was black and white and the sound was all crackly, his first girlfriend proposed to him. Or rather, she asked him to propose to her, because women didn’t do the proposing in those days. But he refused.

‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Aren’t I beautiful enough for you?’

‘You are,’ he said. ‘But you haven’t designed and built your own motorbike and sidecar. Enough said.’

Not that he had either – but he thought it a legitimate excuse not to waste his life with her.

And I heard that years ago he went to a football game – this was before stadiums, when your equivalent of  today’s stadium was just a playing field down the road with bare wooden planks and no advertising – and started a fight with a bloke. It went something like this:

‘Hey mate, got a match?’ asked Granddad.

‘Yes, here you go,’ said the bloke.

‘Cheers. Have you got a map of Mars?’

‘What?’

‘A map of the fourth planet from the sun.’

‘No.’

‘Where I come from that’s fighting talk. Take this!’

That got him in the papers that did – ‘Looney Astronomer Strikes Out’ the headline ran, but the truth was he’d never looked through a telescope in his life. And never mentioned Mars to anyone. He was like that – something would come to him out of the blue and he’d have a sudden interest in it and then you wouldn’t see that something ever again.

Look at him. I call him Mr Snore. Because that’s what he does at night – all night long. I hear him through the bedroom wall. I lie awake listening to the sound of death five feet away in the darkness. Well could you relax hearing that sound? Bet you couldn’t.

His current thing is to collect novels. But only those that begin with the letter ‘B’. Why ‘B’? No-one knows. I’ve asked Mum but she hasn’t got a clue. It isn’t the initial of his own name, or of a past sweetheart lost in time, or anything grand like that. There is no story to it. There’s no big tale I can tell you full of twists and turns. There’s no sense to it.

Nevertheless, he’s got his mouldy bedroom groaning with books like ‘Bonfire-Making in Twenty-Two Exciting Steps For The Hard Of Hearing’, ‘Bicycle Maintenance For The Divorced’, and ‘Beach Building: How To Make Your Own Full Size Beach In Your Back Garden In A Day And Not Upset Your Mum’.

I asked him straight, I said, ‘I never see you read these things.’

He said, ‘What does it matter as long as they look good on the shelf?’

‘Why ‘B’? Why not ‘A’ or ‘C’?’

‘Any more crazy ideas like that and I’ll lock you in the bathroom on a diet of toast and toilet paper for a week.’

Well, reader, can I ask you a question? Does your household have its own newspaper? Ours does. Granddad writes it on Sunday mornings on his home-made petrol-powered typewriter with cake trolley, and we all have our own copy by teatime.

It’s true. He sits hunched over it all day, munching away on chocolate éclairs as he gets together the urgent news about what each of us had been up to. “Mum Washes Twelve Socks”, ran one headline. “In-depth Interview on Page Eight”.

[end of extract]