‘Oh, well, that’s how it is. Listen to this,’ Dad begins again.

I’d like to slip away, upstairs.

‘There’s this list here. This just beggars belief. How come it’s not talked about more? Engines. In August 2000, one of the engines of a KLM aeroplane fell out. The captain managed an emergency landing on a beach. Doors. In March 2005, a door fell off a British Airways Boeing 747 and the plane had to make an emergency landing. The door missed a couple out on a walk by just twenty metres. Tyre. In May 2001, the right-hand tyre of a Blue Panorama Airlines plane fell off. Mount. In October 1999, a tyre mount worked itself loose from a Delta Airlines plane and fell into the middle of a quiet suburb.’

Dad pauses and looks at me and Auntie Annu expect-antly. It’s good that Dad’s finally doing something and that he’s put on his day clothes, but I think he’s overdoing this computer thing.

‘And there’s more: meteorites. On 30 November 1954, Ann Elisabeth Hodges was having a nap in her living room when a four-kilo meteorite fell through her roof, bounced off the radio and hit her on the hip.’

Dad shows us an image of Hodges he’s found on the internet. Ann has a really big bruise on her hip.

‘Fish. When a warm air mass meets a cold one, this can create small tornadoes which suck fish and other sea life out of the water and transport them to dry land. Toads. In 1794, hundreds of toads with tails rained on French soldiers. Golf balls. In 1969, hundreds of golf balls rained down in Florida. Though it does say here that there are cases where the tornado theory doesn’t really work. In northern Greece, the only thing that came down was anchovies.’

‘Perhaps an aeroplane dropped its cargo,’ Auntie Annu suggests.

‘But in 1859, in Wales, it only rained sticklebacks. In those days aeroplanes didn’t even exist!’ Dad looks at us over his glasses, as if waiting for a solution. ‘Besides, the stickleback isn’t a shoal fish, so no tornado could have filtered out sticklebacks and left other fish in the water, never mind stones and clumps of seaweed. Did you know about all this?’ Dad asks Auntie Annu. ‘When you look at these dates, almost every year in some part of the world, some door or engine or whatever falls off. I mean, if a couple of stones hit some windows on houses near a building site, it makes the news and the company gets taken to court. But think about it, what if a whole jet engine falls on the roof ?’

‘I imagine that would be on the evening news,’ Auntie says.

‘Well, I never got to hear about it!’

‘Didn’t happen in Finland.’

And Dad’s list goes on.