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my ignorance but what on earth is the Tees-Exe Line?’
    â€˜An imaginary line.’ Carmen Pharoah slowed on the approach to a tight bend. ‘It runs from the mouth of the River Tees in the north-east of England to the mouth of the River Exe in the south-west. To the west and north of that line is all the high ground in the UK and to the east and south is all the low-lying flat land.’
    â€˜Interesting,’ Ventnor replied. ‘So we are to the east of the Tees-Exe Line just here?’
    â€˜Yes,’ Carmen Pharoah grinned, ‘and that is me telling you that with a Caribbean education, and you with your British schooling didn’t know that? Shame on your teachers.’
    George Hennessey knocked reverentially on the blue-and-green painted door of the modest bungalow on the outskirts of Fridaythorpe. He had never been to the village and found the name as pleasing as the appearance. ‘Thorpe’ he knew to be an ancient Norse word for settlement but ‘Friday’ was unexplained. There was, he thought, probably an interesting story to the name. He drove slowly along the winding road through the neatly kept houses and small business premises that comprised Fridaythorpe, past the Farmer’s Arms which seemed to be the only pub in the village, all the while looking for a road called Wold View, which he had been assured would be on his right-hand side given the direction from which he would be arriving. ‘Ours is the only two-tone door in the street’ had been a confident addition to the directions with which he had been provided. ‘We ran out of blue paint when we had painted the bottom half of the new door so we covered the rest up with some green paint we had left over from another project rather than leave naked wood exposed to the elements. We intended to buy more blue paint to complete the job but just never got round to it.’ Hennessey had quickly and easily found Wold View and had further found it not to be the ‘street’ he had imagined but a small, circular cul-de-sac. He had had no difficulty in further finding the only house with a blue-and-green door.
    After introductions and pleasantries the householder had deemed it sufficiently dry for Hennessey and himself to sit outside, ‘though it might rain anytime going by those grey clouds over there. It will likely be raining in York right now’. Hennessey and Frank Jenny thus went into the Jenny’s back garden and sat on thickly varnished wooden chairs with an equally thickly varnished wooden table standing between them upon which, some moments later, the very homely-looking Alison Jenny, whom Hennessey had never met, placed a metal tray holding two steaming mugs of tea and a plate containing a generous amount of toasted muffins. Hennessey and Jenny sat in silence for a few moments looking down the long garden which was bordered by hawthorn and which, on that day, was resplendent with white blossom. Hennessey saw that there was a line of small trees at the foot of the garden with the remainder of the land given over to neatly mown lawn, cut so as to give alternate light and dark shading.
    A magpie landed on the lawn a few feet from Hennessey and Jenny and began to strut confidently on the grass until, to Hennessey’s surprise, Frank Jenny took the muffin he was eating from his plate and skimmed the plate at the magpie, which took to flight in fright.
    â€˜Wretched birds,’ he explained, by then using his left palm as a plate to hold his muffin. ‘It is traditionally a rare bird, as you may know, but their numbers have exploded in recent years. I have no time for them, no time at all, awful barking sound they make, and they attack other birds. I had to run to the rescue of a thrush once – just the other day, in fact. A magpie had pinned the thrush to the ground, breast down, and it was standing on the thrush’s wings pecking at its head while a second thrush flew around