h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It has been a busy week here in the Holme Valley. Still time to glimpse the sun, perhaps, but no time to stop and sniff the flowers. Work, as usual, predominates.

We are still arguing, as well, about holidays: Elk watching (rational and irrational) is now on the back burner. Last night, the admirable Bettany Hughes presented a very interesting TV programme on the ancient customs of the Minoans. I ventured an opinion to Deb:

"I would like to go to Crete, it's full of ancient ruins."

"Send me a postcard, I am married to one."

Subject closed. For now.

Last night we had a really "winter" meal: baked potatoes. In my case, this was accompanied by some white Port, which I had procured of Messrs Sainsbury after reading about it in A. N. Wilson's book on Hilaire Belloc. It was, apparently, his favourite tipple (Belloc, not A. N. Wilson, I have no idea what he drinks!) It's always amused me the way some drinks are associated with certain writers: Hock-and-seltzer with Byron. Grappa with Hemingway. Anything with alcohol in it, with Dylan Thomas. Having drunk Grappa myself, I now understand why Hemingway only ever wrote in short sentences. And having drunk white Port, I can understand why some of Hilaire's output was Bellocs.

Talking of back burners, Russell, Nigel, Dusty and Kitty all had their comfortable domestic arrangements disrupted by a major fault with the stove, this week which meant we had to let the fire go out in order to fix it. Cue for much yowling, and a tablet-taking strike on the part of Russell which was only broken when I quartered his Fortekor pill and stuck it in some extremely pongy Shropshire Blue cheese. Tig accepted the creeping chill which settled over the house more philosophically, curling up as always with her nose in her tail, on her favourite settee.

Anyway, a quick visit to the people who sold us the stove, the improbably-named "Batley Barless Fire Company" (forever known to us, in honour of Charlie Dimmock, as the Batley Bra-less Fire Company) soon secured the bits we needed, and a half hour or so with a rat-tail file widening the hole on one of them, followed by a similar length of time grovelling on the kitchen floor with my arm up the ash pan aperture, this meant that we were able to adapt it to fit on the end of the bit where the previous pan had burnt completely away, then re-assemble all the parts we had disassembled, and re-light it. Peace, warmth and harmony were restored.

In a bizarre twist of events, the office nearly "caught fire" the day after. This is the "office" office, not my "home" office where I am typing this. I was sitting working away when the fire alarm started going off. After telling everyone to get out, I went to investigate, only to meet Terry coming the other way who said it was a false alarm. Because it is on a "redcare" system, they automatically send the Fire Brigade unless you phone the alarm company's "central station" and tell them it's not for real. Terry did just that, only to be connected, instead of to the usual live operator, to their call centre queueing system. I looked out of the window to see two fire engines pulling in to the courtyard, and went to put the kettle on for fourteen cups of tea.

We spent the rest of the day making up bogus call centre recorded messages on behalf of the alarm company: if you are dying of smoke inhalation, press 1; if you are being fried to a crisp, press 2, please continue to burn, your call is important to us, and so on. There's not that much to do in South Yorkshire.

Actually, that line about putting the kettle on for fourteen cups of tea used to be one of my mother's favourites whenever my dad was trying to light their fire by holding up a news paper in front of it. Always a perilous exercise if you were a child of nervous disposition, as I was.

This week is the run-up to Halloween, a festival now almost completely taken over by Hollywood-inspired dross, and rampant children-targeting commercialism second only to Christmas. The true meaning of All Souls Day, of which the precursor is Halloween, of course, is to remember the dead. People sometimes get the idea that remembering the dead is morbid, but scarcely a day goes by without me thinking of the voices of my parents, as above, and the comments they would have made, as I go about my daily tasks. This week would have been my dad's eighty-third birthday. In the end, we are all going to live only in other people's memories of us. As Larkin says at the end of "An Arundel Tomb"

"What will survive of us, is love."

Originally, All Souls Day was the day when Christians remembered the dead. Those endless ranks of people who had gone on ahead, as Vaughan puts it, into the "World of Light", and left us "lingering here". A time when the unknown and unknowable membrane that separates this world from the next dimension might be stretched so thin that you might be able to glimpse, tantalisingly, a shadowy figure or two. Maybe heaven itself could be glimpsed, as a bright warm light, like the glow of a welcoming fire seen through a held-up sheet of newspaper. Mind you, that might be a bit theologically unsound: perhaps flames are better kept for t'other place. Either way, I'd like to think there would be a cosy celestial fireside waiting in heaven, and a cup of tea for me while I catch up on the gossip and stroke, for the first time in many years, Ginger, Silvo, and Halibut, who have all gone before.

Sometimes, when I am driving to the office in a ruminative mood, I ask for a sign that heaven exists. Dangerous territory, really: you shouldn't provoke God, assuming you believe in him of course. Last week, on Wednesday morning, I rounded the penultimate bend before my destination and there, hanging in the sky ahead, were two perfect contrails, in the shape of a cross. If only I had asked for a sign that morning. Or is it that the signs only come when you stop asking, like remembering where your keys are, when you have finally, exhausted, and exasperated, given up looking? Perhaps the souls of heaven operate to a different timescale to the rest of us down here, it being eternal and everything.

My Grandma, who was the oldest inhabitant of Welton at the time when she died in 1980, could remember the children skipping down the lanes when she was young, the urchins and ragamuffins of Edwardian England, singing the "souling" songs:

"A soul, a soul, a soul-cake

Please good missus a soul-cake

An apple a pear a plum a cherry

Or any good thing to make us merry

One for Peter, one for Paul

One for Him that made us all"

I am not sure if I believe in ghosts. Certainly not the clanking, head carrying, spectres which feature in horror stories. Why should ghosts mean us harm, if they exist? And presumably, if a ghost thumped you, its arm would go straight through you, or vice versa. So the worst you might get is a nasty chill.

If ghosts do exist, maybe there is cause for sadness about some hauntings. I can appreciate the theory that some cataclysmic events do leave some sort of psychic impression of terror or another strong emotion on their surroundings, which in some way replays itself to people who can see it, but even then, we should, perhaps, rejoice, and seize on this as further proof of an existence outside of our three solid dimensions.

We should be embracing ghosts. Except of course, our arms would meet in the middle if we did. Why should ghosts be a source of terror? Wonder should be nearer the mark. Seeing an apparition should be not a trick, but a treat.