A text message from Salvadore.

He’s at the Edinburgh Festival and I’m not, is the gist of it.

I haven’t been for a couple of years now. It was getting uneconomic, if your idea of uneconomic is paying off the last installment on your credit card the month before you return to spend the same amount next year.

Before he left he sent me some photos he’d found.

I am standing amidst the cast of a bad comedy show, dressed in a pink tutu. The others are not wearing a pink tutu. There is something in my face that says ‘I would prefer not to be the only person here wearing a pink tutu’.

I think you could sum it up thus: there are three actorly/comedian-looking people, radiating confident thespianism from their very pores, aglow with the spirit of the Fringe. And one miserable looking bloke, who’d clearly been roped in at the last minute, wearing a pink tutu.

I stole the show, of course. It’s difficult not to, when an audience is desperate for a laugh, and a bloke runs onstage in a pink tutu singing a George Michael song.

That and the fact that I am very funny.

I miss the Edinburgh Festival. It’s so good to see the real Scotland, don’t you think? It continues without me as an important social function, helping to neutralise the decimation of Scottish manufacturing industry by providing good jobs distributing Guardian newspapers and handing out leaflets.

I hope Salvadore has a good time and gets to see lots of shows.

And I hope they’re all lousy.

My piano has arrived!!!

After all this time.

It sits there in the corner of the room, looking brown and pianolike.

Actually, ‘in the corner’ is an exaggeration. It’s a lot bigger than I remember it, and seems to take up fully one quarter of the room. This has already caused tensions between the music- and non-music loving members of the household.

I understand now why John and Yoko needed such a big white living room.

I play a note. ‘Plink!’ it goes. Wahey!

Plink!

Plink, plink, plonk, plink, thud, plink, plonk, plink!

Hmmm. ‘Thud’ is not good, but it’s an A flat, and I tend to save the black notes for special occasions anyway.

Likewise, the ‘soft’ pedal doesn’t seem to work, but I’ve never used the ‘soft’ pedal in my life and don’t mean to start now.

It needs tuning, if I am to learn all the works of the great masters – Beethoven, Shostakovich, O’Sullivan.

I know it might take me a long time to reach that standard. But I am prepared to work for at least the rest of the summer, and some weekends after that as well.

Today West Norfolk.

Tomorrow the World.

Well it was diabolical, wasn’t it?

You start watching something and it’s merely depressing. Then, by the end, black waves of old gittishness are enveloping your soul as you despair of the insult to humanity that decided to spend thousands and thousands of pounds on creating a small piece of shit, that was only ever going to be a small piece of shit.

I don’t mind great risky ventures that fail. And I don’t particularly mind being taken for a cretin. It’s just… it’s just… somebody – SOMEBODY at the BBC MUST HAVE KNOWN that the concept, script, execution and delivery of ‘Match of the Day at 40’ was going to be a fiasco.

I believe in the BBC, but she’s a terrible flirt. In fact she’s that smug, annoying girl at school who knows that she’s adored so much that she can get away with the most appalling behaviour because you’ll keep running back to her.

The BBC has self-congratulatory Tourette’s. It’s shit-scared of losing the license fee – understandably – so it feels it has to big itself up all the time. Forget its self-flagellation over Hutton – it’s a drop in the ocean compared with the tens of thousands of pounds it might blithely spend on exciting ‘idents’ for the Olympic Games – which everybody who’s interested is going to watch anyway.

And ‘Match of the Day at 40’?!? ONE HOUR of ‘we’re so clever, we decided to put football on the telly and isn’t the BBC wonderful for doing so’?!?

As self-analysis goes it was as hard-hitting as QVC.

So we had Arsene Wenger bringing a football perspective to the programme’s impact. Oh – no – hang on. He was just saying that football on the telly was interesting, and that Match of the Day was what it was called on the Beeb. Strangely enough, he didn’t have much to say about the development of the actual show because HE WASN’T IN THE COUNTRY AT THE TIME, YOU CRETINS.

Oooh – better get someone trendy who’s in with the kids to lend some street cred! Who likes football? Er – oh yes, Noel Gallagher. How very 2004. Ronnie Corbett not available, I guess. Yes, we do know how the theme song goes. Thanks.

As luvvie as a box of theatre programmes, this was one corporate wank too many.

Sorry Gary, sorry Alan. I believe in the BBC, but you can laugh at me one too many times.

Normal Norfolk-related news will resume tomorrow.

There is an unusual noise!!!

I’m lying in bed, having just turned out the light. Then it starts.

“Squeak!” it goes.

“Squeak!”

It sounds a little like a child’s soft toy (obviously one with a squeaker in it). And it’s coming from outside the window.

This is a first.

One thing I particularly like about living here is that it’s dead quiet at night. There might be the odd ‘old house’ type noise, generally in the winter – you know, where you lie awake trying to work out whether what you can hear is the wind in the chimney or whether it’s somebody whispering very slowly: ‘I – am – going – to – kill – you…’

Otherwise there’s just the LTLP, who snores like a heffalump. But that’s about it.

“Squeak!”

The sound’s moving around quickly outside the window. One minute it appears to be coming from the front garden, the next from outside Short Tony’s, the next from further down the road. Then back again.

There seem to be two possibilities.

Firstly, one of my mates has made the two hour drive up here, stopping off on the way to purchase a child’s soft toy (inc. squeaker) from a 24-hour service area in order to effect a particularly weak practical joke on me.

I consider taking a potshot into the bushes just to teach them a lesson, but this scenario does seem unlikely, so I am forced to conclude that what I’m dealing with is probably a Peculiar Animal.

“Squeak!”

The squeaks are extremely regular, every five seconds or so. I lie there, marvelling at just how quickly something initially funny and intriguing can start to become very annoying indeed.

I go to the window, trying to locate this Ben Elton of the animal kingdom. I shine a torch out. Aside from being mobbed by flying insects, I can’t see anything.

“Squeak!”

It’s clearly not a cat. Nor a rabbit, nor next-door’s dog, nor an owl. I don’t know what moles and shrews sound like. It could be a young pheasant with a speech impediment, but that seems unlikely.

I switch off the torch. It takes me a moment to realise that there is still a torch beam moving round the garden.

Shit!!!

It has a torch!!!

This is alarming but inevitable. Animals were going to evolve to carry torches sooner or later.

It takes me a further moment to realise that the beam’s origin is Short Tony’s bedroom window. Big relief. I am still the dominant species.

“Squeak!”

I go back to bed and try to ignore it.

A car passes, and the squeak is no more.

Sinister developments.

I saw the first poster a couple of weeks ago, drawing-pinned up in the Post Office.

The second appeared soon afterwards, and yesterday there was a third on the village noticeboard.

Disappearances.

I previously recounted the tale of the cat-shooting maniac, which made the national press and caused villagers to live in fear.

Now there are four more cats missing. This seems a bit of a coincidence.

I have been extremely alert since I got my leaflet from the government, so I went indoors and switched the telly on as instructed. Nothing on the local news.

Then, this morning, as I sat at the PC to write this, I glanced out through the french windows (‘freedom windows’, if you’re in Texas) and guess what I saw?

I NEVER have cats in the garden. Lots of rabbits, pheasants, moles, the odd shrew, an owl, next-door’s dog. No cats.

It was black and white and sitting on the lawn. I wanted to see if it had a name tag, so I ran outside in my pants, but it looked scared and alarmed and shot off into the fields.

Why was it here?

Now I am worried that people will think I have something to do with the vanishings.

But as Billy Joel proclaimed: ‘I am an Innocent Man’!

And who are THEY to contradict the words of the great protest singers?

Somebody has attempted to cut my hedge.

It’s a fairly ordinary hedge. Not particularly horticulturally distinguished, admittedly, but it’s been a loyal boundary for a few years, and I’m fond of it.

I’d accepted the kind offer to cut it with gratitude, and grateful I am still. It’s the thought that counts. However, after ‘the thought’ come things like ‘straight lines’ and ‘not missing big chunks of it’.

My poor hedge. It looks like it’s been dragged through a human backwards.

There isn’t a competitive gardening scene in the village, although there was once a cross item in the newsletter about people letting their shingle stray on to the pavement. (We know who you are). But I look at my hedge now, and am quite sensitive that people will point and laugh at it.

I had planned to do lots of work this afternoon. Now I have to do emergency clipping.

We have to fit some skirting board.

In order to make it join together at the corners, you have to make what is technically (in the Reader’s Digest DIY manual) known as a ‘mitre joint’.

A mitre joint is basically a wonky cut. However, rather than just your normal bog standard wonky cut that you’d make anyway, this needs to be quite accurately wonky. What’s more you need to cut the other bit of wood with exactly the opposite degree of wonkiness, then they fit together at a snug ninety degrees.

For reasons of equality, the LTLP attempts this whilst I sit down to watch the cricket.

At the next wicket, I wander out to see how she’s getting on.

“Youuuu make me feeeel,” I sing, “Mitre real!!!”

How we roared.

There is a certain amount of wastage occurring. I make some helpful comments, which are not received in good spirit. It looks like we might need a special tool.

“Well we haven’t got one,” I venture, “…but Big A ‘mitre’!” (might – er)

She smiles weakly and stomps off round the corner.

Big A has lots of tools, all dating from the seventeenth century. Indeed he does possess a mitre block. Its interest is possibly more archaeological than practical, but she borrows it anyway.

On her way back she passes Wallace’s place. As usual, he is inventing in his garden. He looks bemused at the mitre block, disappears into his shed and reappears with a huge great electrical whirry thing.

This is great. You set an angle on the dial, put a piece of wood on the surface and then big whirling blades of death chomp down and cut a perfect mitre joint for you. Suddenly, I want to have a go.

I am not allowed, even though she is now struggling on working out the angles. More wastage is occurring.

“Is it lunchtime yet?” I ask. “I’m ‘mitre’ hungry!”

An offcut sails past my head.

Time taken: two hours.

Pieces of wood cut: two.