'Well, that explains why no one can figure me out. After four hundred years nobody's quite decided what, exactly, my inner motivations are.' He paused for a moment and sighed mournfully. 'Including me. You'd have thought I was religious, wouldn't you, with all that not wanting to kill Uncle Claudius when at prayer and suchlike?'

'Of course.'

'I thought so too. So why do I use the atheistic line there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so? What's that all about?'

'You mean you don't know?'

'Listen, I'm as confused as anyone.'

I stared at Hamlet and he shrugged. I had been hoping to get some answers from him regarding the inconsistencies within his play, but now I wasn't so sure.

'Perhaps,' I said thoughtfully, 'that's why we like it. To each our own Hamlet.'

'Well,' snorted the Dane unhappily, 'it's a mystery to me. Do you think therapy would help?'

'I'm not sure. Listen, we're almost home. Remember: to anyone but family you're . . . who are you?'

'Cousin Eddie.'

'Good. Come on.'

Mum's house was a detached property of good proportions in the south of the town but of no great charm other than that which my long association had conferred upon it. I had spent the first eighteen years of my life growing up here, and everything about the old house was familiar. From the tree I had fallen out of, cracking a collar bone, to the garden path where I had learned to ride my bicycle. I hadn't really noticed it before but empathy for the familiar grows stronger with age. The old house felt warmer to me now than it ever had before.

I took a deep breath, picked up my suitcase and trundled the pushchair across the road. My pet dodo Pickwick followed with her unruly son Alan padding grumpily after her.

I rang Mum's doorbell and after about a minute a slightly overweight vicar with short brown hair and spectacles answered the door.

'Is that Doofus—?' he said when he saw me, suddenly breaking into a broad grin. 'By the GSD, it is Doofus!'

'Hi, Joffy. Long time no see.'

Joffy was my brother. He was a minister of the Global Standard Deity religion, and although we had had differences in the past, they were long forgotten. I was pleased to see him, and he me.

'Whoa!' he said. 'What's that?'

'That's Friday,' I explained. 'Your nephew.'

'Wow!' replied Joffy, undoing Friday's harness and lifting him out. 'Does his hair always stick up like that?'

'Probably leftovers from breakfast.'

Friday stared at Joffy for a moment, took his fingers out of his mouth, rubbed them on his face, put them in again and offered Joffy his polar bear, Poley.

'Kind of cute, isn't he?' said Joffy, jiggling Friday up and down and letting him tug at his nose. 'But a bit, well, sticky. Does he talk?'

'Not a lot. Thinks a great deal, though.'

'Like Mycroft. What happened to your head?'