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bury Nan and, seeming to have no choice in the matter, I listened in silence. He stated the opinion that there was a front part of him and a back part, and that this rendered him intangible to the common man. ‘No observation of me from any one angle,’ he muttered gruffly, spooning gravy into his gob, ‘can provide a complete picture. Only over time, after viewing me from many bearings, can a full mental image be generated.’
    He sopped the gravy dregs with a crust.
    ‘And even that idea of my appearance,’ he continued, ‘leaves so much to be desired.’
    To illustrate the point he instructed me to make four sketches of him standing by the lake. On rifling through the results and finding that front, back, left and right were correct in every detail, he bellowed with annoyance and tore them to pieces.
    ‘Boy,’ he said later, still flustered, ‘do not tell your father or anyone about that experiment. Nobody would care or understand.’
    Weeks after the household’s despondent return from the hills with Nan, we were striving to eat the evening meal. All was silent save for the clink of cutlery and an occasional, frantic prayer - until Burst nailed his colours to the mast.
    ‘My skeleton,’ he announced, with meaning, ‘is all it should be.’ Then he looked sharply at all present as though daring us to challenge him.
    It became clear that Burst considered his skeleton the eighth wonder. He spoke of it until we could barely see, boasting that it was fantastic. With the arrogance of a monarch he claimed that it formed the Japanese pictogram for ‘public telephone’ when exposed to X-ray.
    This cavalier attitude to endostructure was the last straw as far as Father was concerned and he hissed chapter and verse to Burst as we crept into the hospital. It has occurred to me since that the X-ray machine in the storeroom may not have been in working order but at the time we were bewildered to find that Burst’s chest contained nothing in the way of dense tissue or anything else - the image was as blank as a winter sky.
    ‘Stand aside,’ shouted Father, shoving Burst away and standing at the exposure plate. To his complete dismay the result showed a priceless Penny Black at the juncture of his sternum. Startled, the Verger punched him aside. His own chest seemed to bear the landplan of a flyover which would obliterate the natural and historic beauty of the local area. Professor Leap could detect an ongoing Napoleonic sea confrontation in his image, and disturbingly visible in Nanny Jack’s was the shadow of a giant praying mantis. Adrienne’s entire torso housed a daguerreotype of Ezra Pound being forcibly restrained by psychiatric nurses. Examining my own X-ray I could discern only a church steeple, a Hinton hypercube and a convulsing apache. We had to wrestle Uncle Snapper against the plate and the combined effect of the entire group struggling within the frame produced a kaleidoscopic montage of the 50,000 American GIs who went AWOL in Second World War Europe.
    Leaning in a corner with smugly folded arms, Burst asked us rhetorically whether these were the musculoskeletal systems appropriate to civilized men.
    Gathering our wits with litter-spikes, we went home and resolved never to think about our skeletons again - naively forgetting that our skeletons would make their presence felt whether we liked it or not.

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    I’m all for education but not when it entails being glared at by a pair of eyes behind which there is no brain. There are few lessons to be learned under a moron’s tutelage and foremost among them are degradation and fantasies of homicide - skills I consider unworthy even of a chef.
    Mother once suggested that a school curriculum would slow my learning to a manageable rate and the next morning Father took me reluctantly to school. Whenever one of us entered the village, women swept children from the street, bicycles were abandoned, windows were slammed shut and ineffectual shopkeepers