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."

In which I learn a new word, and fear for James' safety

Mary Dunwich writes:

Question: Why did the dodo cross the road?

Answer: Because my muppet husband forgot to shut the garden gate!

I let Dodgson out to roam about the garden as usual. When I went out to check on him, the gate was open and he was gone. A frantic search later found him over the road in old Mrs Battenburg's front garden. He was roosting in her hardy perennials, trying half-heartedly now and then to reach the crusts on the bird-table (which isn't designed to feed flightless birds).

It took me ten minutes and a lot of bad language to round him up and get him home. Whoever spread the rumour that the dodo was an ungainly bird is a big, fat fibber. They are really surprisingly fast on their toes. Once I flushed him out of the flower bed, he raced around the garden several times at top speed, then zipped back across the road, narrowly avoiding being flattened by a very startled number 27 bus.

All of this put me into a very grumpy mood. I decided to wait until Charlie got home and take it out on him. Some of my troubles were definitely his fault. I was already feeling sorry for myself about missing out on an all-too-rare trip to Oxford, thanks to my son's deceased friend Albert's insistance on a trip to the Oxford Science Museum to check the sums he left on a blackboard on a visit over half a century ago. I really feel that the dead should slow down and get some perspective on their lives. You can't take it with you. Albert seems to be treating death as an extended "Working from Home" day.

"What do you mean by taking the boys to Oxford and leaving me behind?" I demanded as soon as Charlie's foot came through the front door that evening.

"I'm taking Harry to Magdalen College to see the psychology professor," answered Charlie, wearily sitting on the stairs to take off his boots. "They are doing a study on schizotypy, and Harry volunteered to take some tests. You know he won't drive because the Devil keeps telling him to watch his speed and it puts him off."

"Schizotypy? Is that a new word for schizophrenia?" I asked. It's political correctness gone mad, I thought.

"No, schizotypy is a whole range of eccentric behaviours. Schizophrenia just sits on the far end of the spectrum," answered my husband, taking his Dalek lunchbox out of his council briefcase. "We're all schizotypes to some extent or another. Harry's just more extreme than most."

"Are you saying I'm mad?" I asked indignantly. Sometimes you have to work quite hard to pick a fight with Charlie.

Charlie looked at my uncombed hair (I've lost my brush and Minnie's stolen my comb), my unmatched socks and my trousers grass-stained from the dodo-hunt, raised an eyebrow but refused to comment.

I pondered this new idea. Me, a little bit schizophrenic? Surely not. Great-Aunt Fanny, maybe. She was convinced that her neighbour Mr Figgin was a KGB agent sent to spy on her, and that all his junk mail was coded messages from Moscow. Cousin Bertie refuses to wear underpants and talks to the wallpaper. And James.....James is just really creative, okay?

Didn't Albert Einstein's son have schizophrenia? Perhaps there's a fine line between creativity, genius and madness.

"Mmm.....There's still no need to take the boys with you," I grumbled, still reluctant to give up the idea of a fight.

"I thought I might introduce James to the psychologists and see if they want him to sit the schizotypy test," answered Charlie. "You've got to admit, dear, he's not exactly normal. I'd like to know what the professor makes of him."

"I resent that! My boy is completely normal! He's just been misunderstood by people who don't understand how intelligent he really is!" I thundered. "Besides, I wouldn't trust him not to let Albert take the test for him. Having a dead genius sit the test might skew the statistics. Er."

My ears stopped to listen to what my mouth was saying. Maybe channelling the spirit of a dead scientist and travelling back in time is a bit bizarre, even by the standards of an Oxford don. I just hope James doesn't show the professor his dodo. They might want to keep him for further study and not let him come home again. Or the dodo either.