From the management of Private Secret Diary, a very

MERRY CHRISTMAS

and a HAPPY NEW YEAR

We will return in January, by which time amusing things will hopefully have happened.

At this time of year, I’ve often linked back to a selection of old posts of which I’m particularly fond. This time round, if you’re missing me, this link will take you to a random post. (Although sometimes it seems not to work, but that is technology for you). Do let me know in the comments box below which one it was, and whether it was any good.

If you/your partner/granddad/cat etc. get a Kindle, e-reader or Apple iThing for Christmas then those links will allow you to download the book for a couple of pounds. Please do! Proceeds will go towards paying my bar tab.

Happy Christmas.

“You won’t believe what happened!” says the LTLP.

She has been to the supermarket. Because she is at home from work after having Baby #2, she has been doing stuff like this a lot, and cooking. It is a bit disconcerting for me, like some odd gender reversal thing. I have reclaimed the traditional male role, whereas normally my life is more like ‘The Worm That Turned’ by the Two Ronnies. Gradually she is realising the stresses and strains that I endured when fulfiling this ‘staying at home and not really getting a lot of mental stimulation’ thing.

“What?” I demand.

“Well, I was in the supermarket. And the Baby was crying at the checkout. And the assistant asked me if I wanted some help packing and I said ‘yes that would be helpful’ as the Baby was crying, and so the assistant called over to another assistant and they came over and started doing the packing, and I was sort of helping and sort of sorting out the baby,” she explains.

“I see,” I reply.

“And anyway I’d bought a plastic crate to store stuff in, and the assistant who was helping to pack knocked it on to the floor, and there was a big crash and it broke. And the assistant who was doing the till told me not to worry, and sent the other assistant off to get another one off the shelves, but I don’t think that the assistant realised that it was the other assistant who knocked it over; he thought it was me that had knocked it over. So he was sort of looking at me thinking I should be grateful to get another crate as he thought that I had knocked it over, whereas really it was the other assistant who had knocked it over and really it was them who should have been a bit apologetic.”

“So what happened?” I ask.

“They got me another crate.”

There is a pause; I realise the story has reached its conclusion.

“If I were you, I would not bother attempting to write for EastEnders,” I advise.

Our snooker playing has reached a nadir.

The Village has the worst snooker team in Britain. We sit bottom of the bottommost league and, although we have never particularly been hung up about winning, it would be nice not to get horribly beaten occasionally. Last year we even won the odd match, but I think this raised our hopes and expectations to unrealistic levels, making this particular nadir even harder to bear.

(nb to self check before publishing that nadir is the right word think it is but may be type of small anteater)

We discuss this as we unpack our cues.

“We have gone ten frames without winning a single one,” reminds John Twonil who, as captain, has to take pretty well all of the blame for all of our defeats, to be fair. Ten frames is quite a long time, and not exactly Crucible-qualification standard. Part of the problem could be that we do not practise very much, but I am sure that there must be something else that is causing our shaky ineptitude on the baize.

Eddie arrives from the bar with a big tray of beers.

The pairings are made and Mick is drawn to go first. This raises our spirits immediately. Mick is by far the best player out of all of us; he hasn’t been able to play much recently but his reintroduction to the squad means that we have our talisman back.

Mick breaks off, hitting the white ball directly into the blue. This is against the rules of snooker, and means that we give the opposition some points. “Foul!” stutters the referee, staring in incomprehension and amazement.

“Oh,” says Mick.

This is a disappointing start. I turn to Short Tony, who is on next. Perhaps it is his day for feeling lucky. He explains that he had driven all the way to Norwich in the lashing blizzard earlier in the day, only to have to return immediately when his entire car window fell out. He does not feel lucky today. This is reflected in his performance.

Unusually, I am quietly confident about my own match. I have been doing a bit of self-analysis recently, and have identified that I need to hit the cue ball with a firmer action, and straighter, so that the object balls go nearer to the pockets. So much of snooker is in the mind.

“Fifteen frames,” mutters John Twonil as the five of us mooch back to the car afterwards. He is right to be dispirited. This is becoming like one of those situations when you become the ‘and finally’ feature on the local TV news.

We attempt to keep our spirits up on the snowy journey home. I lose control of the car and almost kill the entire team.

I find a bag of money!!!

It is a clear plastic bag, of the sort that they give you in banks. I pick it up from beneath the pile of household bills, where it had been hidden.

There are some notes in there, and many coins. I study the bag in puzzlement.

“Is this your money?” I ask the LTLP, who has arrived in the kitchen to check that I am not doing something that I shouldn’t.

The LTLP denies all knowledge of the money, and is as confused as I am. We don’t use bank bags, and certainly won’t have mislaid forty-five quid without noticing.

“Whose could it be?” she asks.

“It is like some weird reverse burglary,” I ponder. “Have we lost anything to the value of about forty-five pounds? That somebody could have paid us for, without us knowing?” It seems unlikely.

We go through a mental list of people who have visited the Cottage in the past couple of weeks, and whether they would have been anywhere near our pile of household bills. My sister, RonnieB, seems the most likely suspect.

“Did you lose any money when you visited?” I ask her, using the telephone.

“Yes! I did!” she replies.

“How much?” I demand.

“It was – umm – about two hundred pounds?” she replies.

I put the phone down, and park myself in an armchair to consider the problem. Having always been a fan of the Sherlock Holmes books, apart from ‘The Engineer’s Thumb,’ this is my opportunity to follow the methods of the great detective. It is not often that the normal layperson is presented with this sort of opportunity! I do not have any cocaine to hand, so I pour myself another glass of wine and have a quick strum on the banjo.

The bag is clear, and contains money. What am I seeing but not observing? Before too long, I start to get into the Holmsean mindset.

“Sniff this,” I request. “Would you say that the bag was the property of a smoker?”

The LTLP smells the bag. “No,” she says.

“Oh. I thought it was,” I reply. Already we have had a breakthrough and established that the money may, or may not, have belonged to a smoker.

“We don’t use bags like this,” I say. “The only time where we might have a bank bag is if we were going on holiday and had some foreign money. Maybe we then transferred the foreign money to our pockets, swapping it with the English money?”

“When, precisely?”

I open the bag with forensic hands. Carefully, I take each note and coin and examine their dates, one by one. When I am done, I announce my findings. “The newest coin in here is from 2008. So the bag has lain there no longer than that. Where that’s foreign have we been on holiday since 2008?”

“But I tidied up that shelf last week,” she replies. I am a little disappointed that she is not more impressed with my timeframe deductions.

I ponder some more. I am seeing, but not observing. Seeing, but not observing. The coins are of mixed denominations, and so don’t fit the profile of raffle ticket money, or a float for a market stall. The answer, I am sure, is in the bag.

“Let’s work through the case slowly,” I say. “You have a bag like this for one of two reasons. Firstly, if you get an exact quantity of money from the bank. But the coins in here are mixed, so it is not that. Secondly, if you have money that you want to keep separate from your other money, because it has some significance or something.”

I clasp my hands together as my brain works overtime.

“I’ve got it!” I shout triumphantly. And I have – I really have solved the mystery. “It’s my money. John Twonil gave it to me on Thursday as my share of the snooker club funds.” She stares at me. “I was a bit pissed at the time,” I add.

I wave the money around, happily. “You see? By following the methods of Sherlock Holmes, it’s possible to solve any problem.”

“You do not need to follow the methods of Sherlock Holmes when it is your own fucking money,” she replies.