He told me a story once about Thurnscoe, near to where he grew up. The story was about a pub there, and the landlord there and his peculiarities. While nominally he was the landlord, because he was a very heavy drinker, a bottle-a-day whisky drinker, the pub was mostly ran by his wife, who like the rest of the villagers left him largely to his own devices. You would still see him in the pub; never behind the bar, but rather just lurking, glass in hand, with a funny grin on his face. He always had a grin on his face but it was one of those funny, menacing grins. He had a drinker's loose affability but was never overly self-aggrandising or aggressive. He seemed to enjoy company, but mostly preferred to stand on its periphery, hovering by conversation and grinning. Sometimes he would be in a talking mood but would mostly sort of interject without really registering what was being discussed; or rather, he would just talk past you, as if primarily concerned with getting something on the record or working something out about himself. Like many committed drunks, he told his stories in the past imperfect tense, in fragments of memory that would half come into focus before distending into looping background noise.

In fact the only present-day matter the landlord spoke of concerned the boat he was building in his back garden. It was known that before he was a licensee he had made his living building boats for fishermen somewhere on the Humber, and he was often seen around the village gathering pallets, discarded furniture, miscellaneous armfuls of scrap timber, anything that might aid in the boat's construction. People were always sceptical when they first heard about this, perhaps taking it to be somebody's confused metaphor, more past leaking into a staid and empty present. It was said that the tilted hull of the vessel stretched in a complete diagonal arc from back door to far wall, colossal and half in bits like a whale's skeleton, its bow splintering the remains of a garden shed long since harvested for spare parts. You could see it from Stanley's roof, it was said. They asked, how would he ever get it to water? Thurnscoe was ninety miles from the nearest coastline with no decent river, and the landlord and his wife lived in a two-up two-down hemmed in on all sides by other terraces. It would have to have been lifted from the garden by crane.

But he said that some of his friends saw the boat for real and that he took them at their word, and if I was thinking to myself "but surely not in Thurnscoe" then I should ask myself why, as things are as likely to happen there as elsewhere. Or to not happen; for things that aren't real can just as easily happen or not happen in Thurnscoe as well. He does not remember if friends ever asked the landlord whether he had considered the challenges ahead, or where he planned to go with his invention when it was finished, nor does he remember how the landlord died or what eventually happened to his boat. To be honest he seemed puzzled when I asked. The pub he knows for certain is shut and now derelict.