I got a call from an old friend I used to work with and he told me he had witnessed something unusual in his back garden. He didn’t want to talk about it over the telephone, as he put it “they might be listening”. I wouldn’t say he’s paranoid however he doesn’t want me to tell you his name and address. Therefore for this particular case file we will call him by his nickname “Spindles”. I asked him to give us a clue to help us visualise the area. He said “well it’s not been the same since Marks and Spencer moved out of town”. This might not have helped you very much but you can store this information in a box in your mind and mark it “never to be opened again”. In fact this whole article has come from a box in my head which I opened by mistake when I started this blog. However. Back in the 70s Spindles was looking for the golden nugget and ended up in a ladies hairdressers in Croydon. He knew a mutual friend of ours in the navy that was chasing the golden rivet but that’s not a story for delicate ears… maybe another day?
He told me to come fully equipped so I rummaged through my old camping gear and packed a bag containing a mallet, a large stake peg, and some garlic. Having been asked to look at some strange things in my time, its always handy to pack a spare pair of trousers just in case (or make sure the ones you’re wearing are brown). Take some advice from an expert, never try washing stains off your trousers in a public toilet. I remember sitting in a pool of coffee left on a bucket seat while out shopping for a left handed pencil sharpener. How was I supposed to know the stain had gone through my trousers as I stood there over the sink in my pants?
So I travelled up to see him where I was greeted with a warm welcome and a lovely cup of tea and a nice section of cakes.
Spindles then took me into his study under the stairs where he showed me a wrinkly old fossil. I told him to put it away and zip it up. It was an old artefact he had found on one of his trips to the tyrol searching for big foot. He has become so suspicious about this important find he has hidden it in a laptop bag. It was a plaster cast of a footprint he had found in the woods while out looking for spindles. After hours of whittling through a pleasant excursion through his mind we finally got to the reason he called me up there in the first place. He has a large back garden that backs onto woodland and it gets very dark at night as he has neglected to put any lighting outside. A few nights ago he was woken up buy some grunting in his back passage. Under normal circumstances this is normally fixed with a visit to the toilet but in this case the noise was coming from outside. He told me he managed to grab his camera and quickly take this film from his kitchen window. The next morning he went out in the back garden to inspect the damage and found a foot print. He went on to tell me these things normally get named after the places they were spotted e.g.: Beast of Bodmin. He reckoned it may be the Lewisham Lynx or the Catford Cheater or even the Peckham Pussy.
He wanted me to stay up all night and catch the beast with my savoury delights. I looked such an idiot as I unpacked my bag ready to go vampire hunting. I had misunderstood his request for a mallet, I thought he wanted to use it to tenderise a piece of steak to feed the beast - not kill it. He wanted me to stand still in the dark and dangle a piece of old wrinkly meat around to see if I could tempt anything into having a nibble. The last time he did this he spent the latter part of the evening at the local police station having to explain why he had a dead squirrel hanging from his nuts. It was at this point I had to decline the offer as it was so cold outside it would have frozen the bollocks off a donkey.
He was still shook up so he asked me to go rummaging around any animal stools I could find outside his back window. I then went on to tell him that sometimes they name shit after the places it can be found eg: The Pets wood Parcel or the Nunhead Nugget or even the Deptford Dump. In fact sniffing shit will have to be a story for another day. He pushed me out into the back garden, quickly closing the door shut behind me. I was literally shaking as I prodded every bush and found nothing. I brought some pellets back to show him. To my surprise he went on to sniff and eat a couple before he explained to me they were the dry roasted peanuts he had put out for bait. However I did find the strange foot print in the undergrowth and managed to take a photo.
