Pyramid schemes

The horse's head arrived in a large, plastic-lined cardboard box labelled Corsican Confections. I opened the box, and discovered to my relief that it had been refridgerated for the journey and so was still fresh, if a little cold. I patted it once, feeling a little sentimental. I'd bought the horse only a few months ago for my youngest daughter to learn to ride on, and now her lessons would be interrupted until the insurance came through and paid for a new one. However, business was business, and even family couldn't be allowed to get in the way of that. I picked it up out of the box, slightly surprised at just how heavy it was, and tucked it into my second son's bed.

In a way I'd started off the whole chain of events myself by leaving the kids with Shark Timmy for the evening so that I could pop down to the dog track to do a little doping and make a little cash. The kids are fond of Timmy, who they call 'Uncle Spacker' for reasons I've not bothered to go into, so I figured they'd be safe enough. Only while I was watching Gracie's Favour and I can't believe it's a whippet stagger round Wimbledon dog track Timmy took it on himself to tell the kids all about pyramid schemes and how they make money.

The first I found out about this is when I overheard the neighbours laughing because the kids had been round trying to sell them a pyramid. I laughed a little myself and made a note of their names; I'd send the boys round a little bit later to put the mockers on their mockery. And I thought nothing of it, just youthful exuberance and hijinks.

Three days later I noticed that there was a twenty-five foot high pyramid in the back garden of the house three doors to the left. I was surprised that they kids had made a sale, all the more so because it took up pretty much all of the garden.

It turned out that the kids had hit on a real way to make money from their pyramid scheme: they were installing the pyramid overnight and then charging to dismantle it and take it away again. Not a bad little racket, if a touch unsophisticated in its approach. And it probably would have worked rather well if a rainstorm a couple of mornings ago hadn't inconveniently revealed that they'd fashioned the pyramid 'stones' out of cardboard and pretty much melted their pyramid into a soggy mess.

The neighbours complained, and I found it convenient to pay them to keep quiet. But business is business, even when it's family business, so I passed the debt onto the kids. So far they've not paid up, so this horse's head is a little reminder that a debt must be serviced. I have an idea that the kids are putting the thumbscrews on Uncle Spacker, and I'm looking forward to seeing how that works out.

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The kids were outside, lynching the goldfish. I was in the kitchen, peeling potatoes for the Sunday roast, listening with interest as they tried, and failed, to drown it in the paddling pool. Finally the eldest, Jimmy, came in and tugged at a corner of my t-shirt.

"Daddy, can we have the toaster and the extension cord please?"

I sighed; although the toaster is only a cheap'n'nasty Tesco toaster, I'd only bought it a couple of weeks ago and thought that I'd a get a few more months out of it first. However, ransacking my mind quickly I couldn't think of anything electrical that we had that would be cheaper to replace, so I nodded.

Jimmy ran off to dig the extension cord out of the cupboard under the stairs, and I finished peeling the potatoes. I'd got them on the hob in a pan of just-boiling water when the power went off and I mentally kicked myself for forgetting that the kids would have used the first power socket they found, and so would have tripped all the fuses. I went out to the fusebox in the hall, and before resetting the switches, decided I'd better check that they weren't still playing with the toaster.

The kids had, in fact, got bored and run off over to the park to play kneecappings so I fished the toaster out of the paddling pool, unplugged it and dropped it in the bin. I looked at the pool, with Joey the Goldfish lying half in and half out of it, his arms and legs spasmed and his face blackened, and tsked to myself. If people were going to make promises to the kids they couldn't keep then they had to be prepared to take the consequences.