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the back door, “from the finest – hn hm – orchards go into Smith’s Family Apple Pies. This is one of many snuffle facts I know. Er, hm, very few people have watched as much television as I have,” he added, knocking over the nearest kitchen chair.
    Marcia picked the chair up, thinking of the many, many times she had gone out of the living room and forgotten to turn the television off. Chair Person, when he was an armchair, must have watched hours of commercials and hundreds of films.
    Simon turned Chair Person round and sat him in the kitchen chair. Chair Person went very humble and grateful. “You are – hn hm – treating me with such kindness,” he said, “and I am going to cause you a lot of snuffle trouble. I appear to need something to eat. I am not sure what to do about it. Do I – hn hm – eat you ?”
    â€œWe’ll find you something to eat,” Simon said quickly.
    â€œEating people is wrong,” Marcia explained.
    They hurried to find some food. A tin of spaghetti seemed easiest, because they both knew how to do that. Simon opened the tin and Marcia put it in a saucepan with the gas very high to get the spaghetti hot as soon as possible. Both of them cast nervous looks at Chair Person in case he tried to eat one of them. But Chair Person sat where he was, waving his arms gently. “Hn hm, Spiggley’s tasty snacks,” he said. “Sunshine poured from a tin.” When Marcia put the steaming plateful in front of him and Simon laid a spoon and a fork on either side of it, Chair Person went on sitting and staring.
    â€œYou can eat it,” Simon said kindly.
    â€œEr, hn hm,” Chair Person said. “But this is not a complete meal. I shall have to trouble you for a napkin and salt and pepper. And I think people usually snuffle eat by candle light with soft music in the background.”
    They hurried to find him the salt, the pepper mill and a paper towel. Simon fetched the radio and turned it on. It was playing Country and Western, but Simon turned it down very low and hoped it would do. He felt so sorry for Chair Person that he wanted to please him. Marcia ran upstairs and found the candlesticks from Mum’s dressing table and two red candles from last Christmas. She felt so guilty about Chair Person that she wanted to please him as much as Simon did.
    Chair Person was very humble and grateful. While he told them how kind they were being, he picked up the pepper mill and began solemnly grinding pepper over the spaghetti. “Er, hn hm, with respect to you two fine kind people,” he said as he ground, “eating people is a time-honoured custom.”
    Simon and Marcia quickly got to the other side of the table. But Chair Person only took the fork and raked the spaghetti into a new heap, and ground more pepper over that. “There were tribes in South snuffle America,” he said, “who believed it was quite correct to – hn hm – eat their grandparents. I have a question. Is Spiggley’s another word for spaghetti?”
    â€œNo,” said Marcia. “It’s a name.”
    Chair Person raked the spaghetti into a different-shaped heap and went on grinding pepper over it. “When the snuffle grandparents were dead,” he said, “they cooked the grandparents and the whole tribe had a feast.”
    Marcia remembered seeing something like this on television. “I watched that programme too,” she said.
    â€œYou – hn hm – will not know this,” Chair Person said, raking the spaghetti into another new shape and grinding another cloud of pepper over it. “Only the sons and daughters of the dead men were allowed to eat the brains.” This time he spread the spaghetti flat and ground pepper very carefully over every part of it. “This was so that snuffle the wisdom of the dead man could be passed on to his family,” he said.
    By this time the spaghetti was