Things I've Learned From… Ghost Stories [Part 2]

6. Timing:

All the bad things effecting you will ultimately build up to a simultaneous crescendo.

Analysis:

• Look on the bright side: yes, your home may be haunted and the spirits of troubled and crazed dead people trying to kill you; but once it's all reached its peak, the air will be cleared. And all your personal problems will somehow be magically resolved as well.

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7. Family Pets:

Animals will not be happy staying somewhere that's haunted, and will try to escape at every opportunity.

Analysis:

• Just because you're far too insensitive, stubborn and/or sceptical to believe there's such a thing as a ghost, and even though it's tantamount to animal cruelty, force your pets to tolerate being scared witless every time you take them home. After all, they're probably just being melodramatic because it's a new and unfamiliar place. And you can understand that; the place makes you rather uneasy too. But it certainly isn't haunted: you don't believe in things like that.

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8. Family Pets That Have Succeeded In Running Away:

As soon as the aforementioned simultaneous crescendo has been reached, lost pets will come bounding back home.

Analysis:

• Once something leaves your field of vision, it technically no longer exists: it goes into a kind of stasis. You therefore never have to worry about lost pets, since life will be unable to throw anything nasty at them whilst they are out of your care. As soon as the aforementioned simultaneous crescendo has occurred, they will come happily trotting home uninjured, and as if nothing had happened. Then you'll have to start feeding and looking after them again.

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8. Coincidence:

Strike this word from your vocabulary.

There can be no such thing as a coincidence, because that would look far too fabricated.

Analysis:

• Everything in life is part of some bigger, totally convoluted – and sometimes utterly unbelievable – plan. No, really, it is.

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Well, I've finally finished reading it. It took long enough.

Not the author's best by quite some way, I'm afraid.

Or, rather, I'm not afraid, which is what actually seems to be the problem.

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