Last week, up the road from my house, outside the gates to someone's back yard, I noticed seven snooker cue chalks lying on the pavement. You know what I mean, those blue cubes that you use to chalk up your cue when you're playing snooker or pool in an attempt to make it look like you know what you're doing. As if it makes any difference.
They were partially used, but far from being finished.
It struck me as weird at the time that these seven perfectly serviceable chalks should be left on the pavement like this. It begged a lot of questions. Why would anyone have so many snooker cue chalks? And why would they use a bit of all of them, rather than work through them one at a time? Why would they then throw them away before they were finished? And if they wanted to throw them away, why didn't they put them in a bin or a bin-liner, why did they just throw them on the pavement?
Of course there are possible answers. Maybe they came from some pool hall that had closed down. But then why did they find their way on to my street, where there doesn't seem to be any such establishment (unless it's an underground, secret pool hall, but then again if that's the case, and they wanted to maintain their anonymity, then they should be more careful about how they dispose of their partially used chalks.
I decided that it was more likely that there had been a shower of partially used snooker cue chalks, in the same way as there are occasionally unexplained showers of fish or frogs. Admittedly the shower had been quite small and localised to one area of pavement in one insignificant portion of West London, but that was the only real possible explanation.
It was a mystery, all right. But not one of any great interest and I promptly forgot about the chalks, which were gone the next day (possibly having been gathered up by some X-File style governement department, to stop the truth about the very tiny, partially used snooker cue chalk showers getting out).
Maybe they had just been chalks of the mind, a false creation, proceeding from my box-oppressed brain.
But today I walked past the same spot and there was another mysterious appartion. This time there were seven televisions stacked up against the wall by the gate. They were old, but looked like they might still work. And they were all intact, which at least proved that they couldn't have fallen from the sky in some kind of bizarre, tiny, TV shower because they would have been smashed to smithereens.
So the mystery deepened. Why would someone throw out seven perfectly adequate snooker cue chalks one week and then seven (admittedly out of date, but still possibly serviceable) TVs the next?
I wondered if it was possible that Elton John lived in that house and this was just another example of his profligate spending and wastefulness. Perhaps his vanity had caused him to only use a snooker cue chalk once and then throw it away. However much David Furnish suggested selling the still usuable chalks for charity, the prima donna Elton insisted the chalks be thrown in the gutter. He wasn't even prepared to put them in one of his jewel-encrusted bin-bags.
Similarly, possibly he bought 7 TVs because he wanted to watch 7 TV channels all at once, but once the programmes he was watching were over he felt sickened by his own insatiable desire to watch TV and demanded the TVs were also dumped.
This didn't seem too likely either. Why would he buy such crappy TVs and why would he live in this rubbish street and how come I hadn't ever seen him after kicking out time in the Chicken Cottage?
I think possibly the number of the chalks and TVs is significant. On both occasions there were seven items. Is it not likely that the seven dwarves of Snow White fame lived in that house. Each had his own room, his own TV and his own snooker table (or possibly they shared the table, but each had their own cue and chalk). Those dwarves weren't getting any younger and some time in the last couple of weeks they all succumbed to some dwarf-based virus and passed away (it is fitting that they all died together, it's what they would have wanted. Apart from Grumpy, but you know he had a bit of an attitude problem).
Of course the dwarves had no-one but each other, so it fell to Snow White to come down from her royal palace and sort out the dwarves possessions (but she's very busy with her duties and so she can only come once a week).
Perhaps she's left the items on display in the hope that another group of seven dwarves (they always travel in packs like this, as then they are more likely to get work in the pantomime season) would come across the items and find some use for them.
That would explain why the seven chalks are gone. And I wonder if I walk down my road tomorrow whether I'll notice that those TVs have gone too.
And far in the distance I may just make out the sound of seven small mouths whistling while they work.
