The Auction

Well, the auction was this afternoon.

Harold bid on the spirit bottle but was unwilling to commit more than £100 to it, despite my urgings to go higher. It shows what a skinflint he is, if you ask me. I make an almost limitless supply of money available to him and he still holds onto the pennies like they were worth tuppence. The item went to a lady I vaguely recognised as living on Cherry Tree Avenue for £214. It the spirit inside really is malevolent, we’ll soon be taking a wander across town.

Against my advice, however, he bid on the doll’s house. He had to really, didn’t he? I should have said ‘Buy this, Harold, it’s utterly fabulous’ and then he would never have looked twice at it. Of course he bought it for £85, inclusive of doomed souls and wants to put it in the house. At least I managed to persuade him the stables would be sufficient for now and give him the chance to effect repairs. I’m relieved to say he agreed. Lucy is, after all, only nine months old.

Now I‘ll have a chat with Gillian and casually mention the haunted doll’s house.

Image: The Haunted Doll's House (Penguin 60s)

More fun than a Mediocre TV Show

We had a wander through the auction rooms while the shop was quiet yesterday*. Apart from the spirit bottle which did indeed have a spirit inside though sadly not of Benito Fuseli, since I’d found him in the relatively tame second circle of Hell amongst the Fraudsters and the Wearers of Strange Mustachios. Quite who it contains is unknown, though I was tempted to find out and would have done had not Harold rapped me across the knuckles as I went to break the glass cabinet. Alas the cabinet was too small for Devious to gate inside.

I wandered further while Harold examined some cigarette cards, but was unimpressed with the majority of the rubbish on sale. What did catch my eye, however, was this little item:

Wooden Doll’s House. C1930
Hand made by Frederick Glossop, this was in the Prestly family until 2004. It is now unexpectedly back on the market after the death of its present owner. Proceeds of the sale to be donated to Laverstone Women’s Institute.

This little toy has a dark history or I’m an angel. I counted at least three separate spirits trapped between it’s little balsa walls. I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole.

“Oh look,” said Harold when he caught up. “How adorable. I’ll get it for Lucy.”



*Quiet except for the shrieking of Julie as she realised no-one had doctored the accounts for three months. Now she’s frantically rooting out purchase notes and sales receipts and trying to balance the books. Impossible, of course, due to the unique nature of the business. Inland Revenue would take one look at ‘dispatching overdue soul to eternal torment, £697.20’ and either laugh or wet his pants and I, for one, can’t afford the dry cleaning bill.**

**unless its tax-deductable, naturally.

Image: Dolls' Houses: From the V&A Museum of Childhood

Bellend and Grommet

Bellend and Grommet’s auction house on Filter Street* used to be both rival and accomplice to Harold’s second-hand Emporium. He’d never miss an auction in those days, often buying up job lots to sell in his shop, and selling choice items by auction in return. We still keep an eye on their listings in case something pertaining to the supernatural turns up and it did today.

Spirit bottle. C 17th century.
Purported to contain the malevolent spirit of the magician Benito Fuseli, locked inside a bottle as punishment for his crimes against the church in 1685-89.

It was listed as worth £50-300 but with such paltry sums** it was well worth a shot. The actual auction is on Thursday but we’ll drop in on the viewing room this afternoon.

More fly0tipping spotted this morning. I’ve written to the council about it. I gave it to Harold in order to save a stamp. What’s the betting he tosses it into a hedge somewhere?





*Originally Philtre Street, since it was the province of the doctor and apothecary in the eighteenth century, the name was altered by common parlance in the mid twentieth century when oil filters were more common than potions

**for a demon


Image: Buying Bargains at Property Auctions

Crocosmia

How delightful!

I was coming through the cemetery this morning on my usual trot round – I like to see the state of the graves at least once a week. You can tell a lot about people by the way they tend the graves of their family. Or don’t. One grave I spotted had a beautiful show of Crocosmia flowers and as luck would have it, they were the deep red varietry known as ‘Lucifer’. How perfect is that!

Of course, Felicia and I can only pop through early in the day, often via a pair of gaps in the fence. It’s easier to use the gaps in case anyone sees us – Felicia can easily leap a six foot fence and I can either fly over or portal through. There are fewer people about in the morning compared to the heat of the afternoon. The cemetery has few mature trees and thus little shade from the sun.

Now then. Monday’s my day off from the shop. I’m off to the park with Lucy for an ice-cream. Would anyone like to join me? Signatures on the dotted line, please.


Image: Crocosmia 'Lucifer'

'Enviro': the Buzz-Word of the Day

Distressingly, I began my post today with an adverb.

Similarly annoying was the discovery of some overnight fly tipping in the woods bordering the manor. Now, I can’t be present all the time and since the tipping wasn’t actually on the homeland of the manor (which would have set off several alarms thanks to the magical barrier around the property*) we didn’t spot it happening.

We alerted the council (the woods are technically the province of Laverstone Town Council as far as the ridge line of the Cheviots, where they become National Trust) and they sent a man out to have a look at it. Not bad for a Sunday morning – Harold taking up a position on the council has its benefits – but what he did was umm and arr a bit, slap some little stickers on the bags and cordon off the whole lot using yellow tape with the words ‘Enviro Crime Scene’ on it. I’m guessing ‘Enviro’ stands for ‘environmental’ but I wouldn’t swear it wasn’t a new music movement in the wake of punk and emo.**

Harold violated the scene after he’d gone, extracting a ripped-up envelope from one of the plastic sacks. A swiftly applied joining spell revealed the perpetrator John Frobisher of 12 Pine View. He gets a front page article in tomorrow’s Laverstone Times – He only nipped to the shop to get a packet of cigarettes and during those twelve minutes a council garbage truck lost control and shed its load all over his garden. It turned out to be a couple of teenage joyriders who weren’t insured either, so the council weren’t liable for the removal.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a couple of lads to offer cookies to.




*We have the elves to thank for that. Not literally, but the sneaky buggers were able to get right to the manor (and in once case inside it) before we spotted them. These days the occasional false alarm as a tourist blunders past the warning signs is worth the peace of mind it gives. I still haven’t decided if I’m relieved or frustrated that Harold ignored Gillian’s advice to make the barrier lethal.

**Where people wear depressed glove puppets and play ‘Feed The World’ at 33 rpm.


Image: The Well: an Enviro-Thriller

So Gay

Julie made me a pot of tea this morning. How pleasant was that? “I love your rough tongue,” she said. “Though my nipples are sore from you licking them all night long.”

I hadn’t got the heart to tell her I went to work as soon as I heard her snores. With it being so warm at night at the moment (double figures, no less) we generally leave the window open. Of course, Gillian has cats.

Work was interesting last night. It’s rare that the country as a whole has such a collective feeling of outrage and loss, and last night was inspired by a television programme. I’ve heard writers talk about the phrase ‘kill your darlings’ but I never though it would be to the detriment of the story. Oh yes, it was passionate and advanced the story greatly, but removing four of the five major characters seems a little like overkill to me.

Still, it gave me a good double handful of misery to spread about. Fantastic! As the Doctor would have said in GI Joe if he’d still been the Doctor.

Which he isn’t, so he didn’t.

A bit of a short entry today so talk amongst yourselves for a bit.


Image: Torchwood - Children of Earth DVD

Twilight

Twilight Pharmaceuticals on Oxford Road has had an upsurge of interest of late, following two troubled tax years of changes of ownership and the sudden and unexpected demise of half of the board of directors.

They made their name from the steady release of cutting-edge technology from their super-secret base. From the road, their offices looked like a gamekeeper’s shack just to the side of a lay-by but once inside you found in went down twelve stories into the earth and ran almost the whole length of Laverstone via a number of underground tunnels.

It remained semi-secret from its inception in 1923 right up until 2009, when a group of interested teens tried to discover the whereabouts of vampires by the use of Google Maps and Google Earth.

To an upsurge in geek joy, Google pinpointed not only the above-ground office on Oxford Road, but two further exits from the cave system in Laverstone. Twilight suffered a deluge of visitors looking for the secret underground hideout of angst-ridden vampires and emo-puppetry.

It amused me no end. The number of wards and anti-demon devices Twilight churned out in latter years was truly infuriating. I’m sure they’ll put an injunction of Google Earth soon, though they’ll never discover who leaked the information.

Image: Twilight: Red Edged Special Edition