Lost

Last night Uncle Trevor turned up unannounced with twelve bottles of K Cider, a camp bed and a boxset of the first series of Lost on DVD. I was not, as you can imagine, overjoyed to see him.

Things are complicated further by the fact that Uncle Trevor is a seven foot tall polar bear and and further still by the realisation that I could see, from the briefest of glances at his enormous incisors, that stuck between them, at irregular intervals, were bits of what was left to the world of Mrs Matthews from next door. This, I felt, was going to be another 'police night'.

Funnily enough when the policeman did turn up the first thing he did was ask where we had got K cider as he was sure that they stopped making it years ago. Uncle Trevor refused to divulge his sources making some excuse about Finnish state security and the Gaymer Cider Company based in Bath.

Then, of course, the policeman asked if Trevor would accompany him to the local station. Uncle Trevor, being a polar bear, and thus having no concept of the sanctity of human life or the trouble he was in, and also being an alcoholic, and thus relatively suggestible, agreed to his proposal without too much fuss. Which left me alone to inspect the remains of my lounge. It is surprising quite how much damage one bear can do in such a small amount of time.

There was also the matter of Mr Matthews.

Uncle Trevor isn't actually the polar bear in Lost but he is, to those who are relatively unfamiliar with arctic mammals, reasonably similar in build. I decided Mr Matthews would probably find the fact of his wife being eaten slightly less upsetting if he thought she had been consumed by a minor celebrity and so on the post-it note I affixed to the Lost boxset and then left on Mr Matthews step as a sort of making-the-peace gesture I'm afraid I may have told a white lie.

It seemed, under the circumstances, to be the most neighbourly thing to do.