Brading The Experience.
THE VIEW FROM HERE
FOR several years a pedestal stood in the entrance to Brading Wax Works Museum, on the top of which was a little glass case.
It contained a cutting of a feature written in 1969 by a daft young journalist who had volunteered to spend the night there alone to see if the place really was haunted.
I was the idiot concerned and the photograph included in the article acted like my personal picture of Dorian Gray in reverse.
While I continued to display the full ravages of advancing years, the lad in the photograph remained forever 21, with a slim build and a full head of dark hair.
Fortunately, it was removed a few years ago to spare me further pain but the memories came back when I saw the story in the CP last week about the mortal remains of Louis de Rochefort.
It’s his spirit which was said to haunt the museum and a somewhat unconvincing collection of old bones bearing his name had been on display there in a glass-topped container for many years.
This was the brainchild of Graham Osborne-Smith — a born huckster and former actor — who opened the museum in 1965.
If Graham had lived in a different place at a different time, he would have been travelling the old West in a covered wagon flogging snake oil and other miracle cures to gullible homesteaders.
He realised most of us were suckers for a good ghost story, so he shamelessly plugged this one for all it was worth.
Soon Brading was buzzing with tales of how Louis’s spectral presence was often to be seen flitting through the old building and how his screams were said to echo around the nooks and crannies late at night.
It was even said a phantom coach could be heard rattling along the road outside but most locals put it down to chucking out time at The Bugle.
It was all good Hammer-horror stuff and, like Graham, I also knew the appeal of ghost stories to readers. So when I volunteered to stay overnight in the museum, we both knew it would be a mutually beneficial arrangement.
There was, however, one inexplicable episode which remains a mystery to this day.
I asked if it would be okay to bring my parents’ German shepherd, Trudy, to the museum during the day because I’d read somewhere that dogs were supposed to be ultra-sensitive when it came to visitors from the spirit world.
Graham smiled enigmatically. "Please do," he said, "but you will find there is one area of this building your dog will not enter, no matter how hard you try."
I grinned back, convinced it was another classic piece of Osborne-Smith flummery.
When the time came, Trudy mooched listlessly around the building with a sniff here and a snort there. Suddenly, she stopped in her tracks and the hairs in front of her tail lifted as they always did when she was agitated.
She issued a low growl and refused to move forward. I walked in front and pulled on her lead but she was clearly distressed at the prospect of moving any closer to one particular tableau, which showed a stabbed man lying in his bed.
We returned from whence we had come, to find a smiling Mr Osborne-Smith in the foyer.
"Everything okay?" he asked.
"Sure," I said.
"Except your dog wouldn’t go anywhere near the stabbed-man display would she? No dog ever will."
It was an unnerving start to my overnight stay, which was otherwise disappointingly uneventful and passed without an apparition, a scream or the sound of a rackety old coach clattering by outside.
But I steered well clear of one particular display …
A calendar that makes a date with recycling
RECYCLISTS are a fanatical bunch. There are no extremes to which they will not go in order to protect the planet from imminent destruction.
They will re-use anything — and I’m never sure whether they are true eco-warriors or just a bunch of tight-wads.
Is unpicking an old jumper and knitting a woolly hat and scarf from the proceeds an act of selfless eco-friendliness, or the demented fumblings of someone with too much time on their hands?
Either way, it is a false economy. Surely it stands to reason if you turn an old jumper into gloves and a scarf, you are going to need a new jumper.
This means some sheep somewhere is going to be deprived of its natural insulation — and no doubt it will be removed with electric shears — so just how does the Earth benefit in the long run?
But this week, someone I have known for many years pulled off a genuine recycling first.
Rather than invest in a calendar for 2010, he (and no, it wasn’t Malc Lawrence) sat down with last year’s calendar and meticulously re-numbered every day.
He (and I won’t mention his name for fear of incurring the wrath of calendar producers everywhere) told me: "I only glance at it to check the date, so why waste money investing in a new one?
"There’s plenty more space so I might do the same thing next year and the year after."
The motives may be dubious, but the logic is impeccable.