James offers a reward

Tuesday
Mary Dunwich writes:

The boy's science project was due in today, so Charlie and Harry loaded their space-time travel module into the back of the our and drove it for them to Bouncing Bunnies Primary School. They also took in their written work (mostly designs for the modification of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, thought up by the ever-inventive mind of the late Professor Albert Einstein, whose spirit my son has been channelling all through this school term).

The boys are not in a happy mood since their key piece of evidence for time-travel, the dodo which they brought back from the seventeeth century, had it away on his little toes and was last seen in the spacious and historic grounds of Magdalen College, Oxford. They took the rather less convincing seventeenth century dead black rat (from the Great Fire of London, you could see the singe marks on his fur if you looked really hard), and some very wobbly footage of Granny Dunwich's sitting room from the nineteen sixties, taken using Jay's mobile phone.

Miss Bannock was not entirely impressed with the boys' efforts. She admired the aesthetics of the travel module (the Christmas fairy lights do really look very good on it), but as they couldn't get it to work she didn't really get the full-on time machine experience. Harry thinks the wireless LAN installed in the classrooms was emitting a damping standing wave field. I suspect that the panel of switches that got knocked off the contraption as they heaved it into the boot may have had some critical function. Either way, once in the classroom under the bemused gaze of Miss Bannock, it refused to budge so much as an inch (or a second). It was all very disappointing for Stanley, Jay and James. Miss Bannock liked the write-up however, and gave them a C+. That's not bad for a project that shows no sign of working, ever having worked, or ever becoming capable of working in the future. It's better than James got for his frog-stretching machine, and that even worked!

James came home in a bad mood and wrote out a reward notice for Dodgson. I sneaked a peak at it before he e-mailed it off to the psychology department at Magdalen College. It said:

"Missing: one Dodo! (Raphus cucullatus)

Height: one metre
Weight: 20 Kg (podgy)
Colour: light grey
Feet: Yellow
Beak: Long and curved
Tail: White and fluffy
Wearing: tartan dog-collar

Answers to the name of Dodgson. If you find him, please keep him warm, give him some pigeon food and a bowl of water and ring us on the number on the collar. Or you can contact the Psychology Department at Magdalen College because they know who we are.

He also likes Maltesers.

Reward for information leading to return: 10 Mars Bars, 3 Fruit Shoots, 32p, a champion conker and a plastic dog poo."

Baking a cake for Harry The Geek

Mary Dunwich writes:

It is Harry the Geek's twenty-eighth birthday tomorrow and I'm baking him a cake.

I should like it known that it wasn't my idea to call him The Geek. He insists on it. He has considered the range of likely nicknames and decided that The Geek is probably the best he's likely to get. He is proud of being an electronics genius, and rightly so. Harry is tall, dark and Scottish, good-looking in a brooding sort of way, and fiendishly intelligent. He is quietly spoken, well-mannered and very good with children. He's just my type, although I daren't tell him how gorgeous he is because it would only embarrass him. He doesn't have much self-esteem. Ah, if only I were still single. If only I were younger. If only the Devil would stop stealing all his socks. Harry the Geek has schizophrenia.

We met him four years ago now, when we were up at St Isaac's scrumping for apples. He had been an inpatient there for some time, and had just escaped from the ward for a shopping trip. The orderlies searching the grounds for him saw the Werewolf up an apple tree, and were understandably confused. My husband refused to be coaxed down from his tree, and by the time a nurse had fetched a ladder Harry had returned from PC World and was offering to hold it steady for them.

It was the start of a beautiful friendship. We all took to Harry straight away. After all, hearing voices, seeing odd things or having peculiar ideas is hardly unusual in our house. Now that James is channelling the spirit of Albert Einstein, and the Devil now only talks to Harry on Father's Day, it's hard to say which of them is weirder. The medication they put Harry on at Sir Isaac's keeps him pretty stable, and he even managed to finish his master's degree while he was an inpatient there (that must have involved a lot of escaping). Charlie helped Harry to get his first proper job at the Council and they work in the same office planning road crossings for badgers. In return, Harry designed and built our doorbell out of an old Coke can and the insides of some musical greetings cards.

I have invited him round tomorrow for a proper birthday tea, with jelly and a cake and candles and everything. Minnie and James are very excited. So, I think, is Harry. He doesn't have a lot of friends or family (and certainly not family who are friendly) so he spends his birthday alone and gloomy unless forced to have a good time. He can't drink with his medication and anyway isn't a party animal, but he likes Doctor Who and stupid jokes and any toy with a battery in it. I might even ask James to take him for a ride in his space-time travel module. Hey, Harry's schizophrenic, he's not going to tell anyone he's travelled through time, is he? Not without getting his medication reviewed.