21st-Century Yokel. Tom Cox

the blade of the falling bowsaw. This caused him to flip over in the air and land hard on his spine. It was half an hour before the paramedics arrived, and during that period he and my mum made a major mistake. Due to the vast amount of pain he was in, he could not stand or crawl properly, but he tried to edge along the ground in tiny increments towards the back door, encouraged by my mum, in order to escape the rain. When you’ve fractured your vertebrae, as my dad had, the one thing you should not try to do is move, as this can sever the spinal column irreparably.

      ‘I was such an idiot,’ my mum told me. ‘But in my defence it’s very difficult to know when someone is really hurt when they’re as melodramatic as he is. When I give him a haircut and his bare skin touches the back of the chair he yells like he’s been stabbed.’

      The paramedics ticked my parents off for their error, loaded my dad into their ambulance then attempted to reverse the vehicle out of the house’s awkwardly shaped driveaway but got stuck. As the morphine the paramedics had given my dad began to kick in, he shouted instructions to the driver, who after several tense minutes got the vehicle pointing in the right direction and on the road to the hospital, several miles away, in Mansfield. Upon arriving and seeing a consultant, my dad was asked if he had any allergies. ‘YEAH, JEREMY CLARKSON,’ he replied.

      He would walk again, the doctor said, after my dad had been properly examined, but it was of paramount importance that he stay absolutely still in his hospital bed for a week after the surgery. Strapped to the mattress, he was attended by a very camp male nurse who, every time he caught my dad attempting to move, would slap my dad’s ankles and say, ‘Naughty!’ ‘I WAS OFF MY FACE ON MORPHINE AND THOUGHT KENNETH WILLIAMS AND HATTIE JACQUES WERE GOING TO WALK IN AT ANY MINUTE,’ my dad later recalled.

      After the week had elapsed he was told that he would be able to go home as soon as his body brace arrived. A day later the brace had not arrived. He amused himself by asking my mum to photograph him doing an I’m dying! face then instructing her to send the photograph to me. Three days later the brace still had not arrived. The consultant told my dad it would be here soon. ‘IS IT COMING FROM FAR AWAY?’ he asked. ‘LONDON? OR CASABLANCA?’ The consultant said no, that it was here in Mansfield, in a cupboard downstairs, but the man who was supposed to bring it up hadn’t got round to it yet. My dad asked the consultant how much it was setting back the NHS per day to keep him in this bed. The consultant put the figure at around eight hundred pounds. ‘SO YOU’RE SAYING BECAUSE A BLOKE CAN’T BE ARSED TO WALK UPSTAIRS WITH A BACK BRACE IT’S COST THE HOSPITAL TWO THOUSAND FOUR HUNDRED POUNDS?’ The consultant admitted that this was more or less the case. My dad asked for the phone number of the man who was supposed to bring the brace up and called him and said that if the brace didn’t arrive soon he would call the local newspaper and tell them about this fiasco. Four minutes later the man arrived in the room with the brace.

      Back home, wearing the brace and severely limited in his movements, my dad admitted that his injury had served as a wake-up call: he’d been trying to do too much for a man of his age. ‘So you’re going to stop chopping logs?’ I asked, when I visited. ‘YEP. NONE OF THAT ANY MORE,’ he replied. ‘CAN YOU GET ME A DRINK? I’M SIXTY. I USED TO DO EVERYTHING FOR MY DAD WHEN HE WAS SIXTY.’ My mum, meanwhile, moved the wooden head from the willow tree to the porch, directing its gaze away from the house and the offending tree, towards the garden hedge. ‘I can’t bring myself to get rid of it,’ she said. ‘I feel like something bad will happen if I do, either to me or somebody else. It’s all nonsense of course. I know I’m being silly.’

      My parents’ house is in a shallow, bright valley, and Sunnydale is what it says on the front door. My mum chose the name after talking my dad out of his first choice, Alien Sex Pit. They purchased the place in the uneasy final days of the last century, when people thought computers would set fire to the world. The house’s former owner had died in it on her hundredth birthday: a feat of very specific hanging-on and letting-go that, even though numbers are just numbers, seems a beautiful demonstration of personal willpower, even more so for the fact that it happened only a few weeks before the final curtain of an entire millennium. When my parents first viewed the house no object in it appeared to date from beyond 1958. The building is made from the small red Cafferata bricks synonymous with villages around Newark-on-Trent. The covered, open-sided oak porch is a much later addition by them, along with a third bedroom and the airy downstairs room where my mum paints, sews, prints and sketches. For the five years after my dad’s accident the head remained apparently content in its new home on the wall in the porch. On a wooden rack below it, toads moved in and out of my dad’s old loafers and running shoes, but the head never seemed swayed by their itinerant spirit. For me these five years passed more quickly than any before them: years of final fully entrenched adulthood, unshockable years of muddling along, caring a hell of a lot less about a few things I once did care about and a fair bit more about a lot of things I once didn’t. I imagine they passed more swiftly still for the wooden head, as years probably do when you’re a wooden head carved at an undetermined point in history and of a potentially haunted nature who has lived enough to be surprised by very little. In early 2014 my parents had to have a large part of the house rebuilt on their insurance after discovering that the long-term leaking of a shoddily fitted shower had caused serious structural damage and the roof was in danger of collapsing. This was the latest in a long series of water-based mishaps in the house, including a cracked pipe in 2011 which resulted in a large stain on the living-room ceiling resembling a short but bulbous penis.

      ‘Do you think this looks rude?’ asked my mum.

      ‘Not at all,’ I replied.

      None of these events affected the wooden head. It continued to stare implacably away from them towards distant fields containing cattle, none of which were struck down during the same period with any significant or mysterious cases of murrain or cowpox. But after its fall from the porch during Christmas 2014 – the Christmas when I accompanied my dad to watch hunters set off to hunt a man dressed as a fox – the head began to get restless and embarked on several other excursions. None of these were very ambitious, usually ending with the head on the flagstones below and never straying beyond the porch’s threshold, but as 2014 became 2015 and 2015 wore on, the head’s tiny holidays became more frequent. My parents would replace it on its perch – always looking away from the house and the now-pollarded eucalyptus – but sometimes by the end of the day it would be back on the ground. A couple of times they found it inside the footwear on the rack below where it lived, including in one of the fateful loafers, which my dad still refused to throw away and continued to wear for lighter gardening tasks. More and more puzzled each time, my parents replaced the head again and again. Its tumbles to the ground were never witnessed by human eyes and occurred not just in high winds but in weather so still that the leaves on the trees in the garden barely vibrated.

      My dad’s exercise regime had slowed down by now, marginally. A month after coming out of his back brace he dusted down his axe and began to chop wood again. Then, after going to see the consultant at the hospital and being told that the condition of his fracture had regressed due to his chopping, he stopped. Then, a few weeks after that, he started again and never stopped. He did cease running around the village cricket field but began swimming at the local public pool, making new friends from eclectic walks of life: architects and retired miners and library assistants and bikers and archaeology lecturers and policemen and billboard salesmen. Sometimes while naked and wet my dad would talk to his new friends at such length in the changing room that one of them would bring their towel over and begin to dry him. Just as my phone conversations with my dad would invariably end with him instructing me to ‘WATCH OUT FOR FOOKWITS AND LOONIES’ they would now tend to begin with ‘THIS WEEK AT SWIMMING…’ One week at swimming my dad was discussing a cashpoint in Nottingham which has the statistical reputation of being the scene of more muggings than any other cashpoint in the UK, and his policeman friend, also named Mick, told him that he had taken a statement from a student who’d been mugged down the road from the cashpoint. Not having any cash on him, the student had offered to pay the muggers by cheque. The muggers declined and escorted him back to his flat, stripping it of its most valuable contents. Another week at swimming my dad hid Malcolm’s