We Need to Talk About Brian

Dear Mr Stocks,

I just want to take this oppotunity to write and indeed thank you for your letter of last week outlining several points that have come to my attention lately.

While your letter was very much appreciated it wasn't quite what I was looking for and I think I may have detected a somewhat evasive tone.



For instance I am still unclear what motivated your son to cut the telephone line to my house on the weekend of the 13th of May 2012 rendering me completely incapable of ordering my favourite chicken byriani from 'The Khyber Pass’ Indian restaurant near Stoke-Newington.

While I accept your explanation that he ’was probably just having a laugh’ this does not explain why twenty minutes later my house was sprayed with machine gun fire for a period of approximately two minutes. While I am sure you are right in saying that this was ’just a coincidence and must have been somebody else’ I can not actually disprove that statement. Nevertheless, I still feel that there is indeed a very high probability that it was Brian who was responsible for the spraying incident. The reason I say this has already been covered in my letter to you of the 11th April 2012 where I posited the question

"what precisely did your son Brian mean when he shouted down the phone ’if you don't get out of my town i’m gonna cut your phone line and then spray your house with bullets for two minutes’?"

For me this statement alone was sufficient to initiate legal proceeding against Brian but your assurance to me that you had confiscated the keys from Brian, to your weapons cupboard, was enough to make me give your son another chance. Incidently, I feel as though I must remind you that the reason you had to confiscate the keys from Brian in the first place was because he’d been using the L42 Enfield long range sniper rifle in order to re-enact the now infamous J.F.K. assassination upon my cat ’Mrs Chippings.’ I am sure you recall my letter to you of the 13 March 2012 where I indicated to you 

'I am not prepared to accept that Brian was aiming to miss Mrs Chippings in this incident for two reasons; 

Firstly because J.F.K. only took two bullets yet Mrs Chippings had taken eight, leaving only her four feet remaining on the car bonnet. 

Secondly because Mr Chipping’s feet had been nailed to the aforementioned car leaving me to wonder how it was actually possible to keep ’aiming to miss’ such a small target from half a kilometre away yet still hit it. Whilst I was prepared to accept this as a one off incident doubts began to surface when the subsequent 'assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald' was enacted upon ’Mrs Craddock’ my prize winning Buff Orpington chicken who’d won the East Cheem Poultry Association’s ’Plumpest Plumage’ competition in 2006.'

Despite all this, when my telephone line was deliberately cut I was most peeved when the telephone company subsequently billed me for the reconnection despite it not being my fault. Nevertheless it was reconnected most promptly by Mr Earnest Smithers of 74 St Swithens Street, Chingford Kent in an apparent world record time and I am delighted to say that I played a small part in his successful world record attempt.

In any case this has not been the first time someone has been responsible for cutting the telephone line to my house in recent times. The first was on its own not a terrible offence as it was during the evening of the 27th of April 2012. Mercifully my chicken byriani had been eaten not four and twenty minutes earlier and I was having a very nice snooze on the sofa after watching the Channel Four News. Admittedly, since I had not actually used the telephone that day it is difficult to estimate when the phone line had actually been cut however, for me, the best clue that it had been done at that moment was because I was awoken to the sound of somebody near my front door shouting,

’yes it’s OK I can see the fucker asleep on the sofa so he’ll never know I've cut his telephone line.’

On its own that is not really a serious problem but the following statement shouted by the same person I found a trifle disturbing,

"now ’urry the fuck up and stick the fucking petrol bomb through the tosser’s letter box"

Now i’m not entirely sure about this but approximately two seconds later, maybe three, I heard my letter box open very quickly followed by the scraping noise of something very large being pushed through it. This was followed by a shattering noise and almost instantaneously after that a sound that went something like ’whomp’ which, incidently is exactly the onomatapaic sound i would ascribe to the ignition of a large amount of petrol igniting in a very small hallway. It came as no surprise then that the next thing I was aware of was my very small hallway being ingited by a petrol bomb followed by footsteps running away very quickly.

Whilst I was perturbed by this series of events I still held in the back of my mind your words that it was just a, 

’load of teenagers having a laugh and that everything would probably be alright’

It was only when I realised some two minutes after I had been trying to unlock my back door that it had been barricaded from the outside that I realised that, while it may indeed have been a load of teenages having a laugh not everything was going to be alright and that I was indeed in the process of experiencing an attempt to end my life by a third party.

Whilst I can prove none of this particular episode was the responsibility of Brian I feel as though I must reiterate here the earlier statement about him cutting my phone line and spraying my house with bullets.

I do agree with you on one point though about Brian rescuing me from my burning house. Yes I suppose I do have to accept that he got me out of the place and to an extent I do have to be grateful to him for this. However, whilst I appreciate my life was close to it's end I am somewhat sceptical about Brian's claim that I was on fire and that he was trying to put out the flames. I say this for three reasons;

The first reason is I feel that the ten minutes he spent putting out the aforementioned alleged flames was excessive. A simple dampening down of those alleged flames would have sufficed. Instead Brian's dampening lasted for what seemed like an eternity and its thoroughness coupled with Brian's words "I'm gonna smash your fucking head in" indicated to me that Brian was not attempting to put out any flames but was merely trying to inflict harm upon me.

The second reason I say I was not on fire was because of  the subsequent examination by a Doctor, upon myself, who described the dampening down as more akin to a,

'Lynching by a savage gang of football hooligans than an attempt to put out a fire.'

The same Doctor was also perplexed as to how somebody could think that a dagger would be of any use in putting out a fire. This was related to the seventeen knife wounds he found embedded deep into my back.

Finally and for me this is the clincher, to date no doctor has yet to find a single burn upon my personage leaving me to think that Brian was lying about the flames'

Incidently, I would actually like to take this opportunity to kindly ask you to extend my greetings and gratitude to your good wife Mrs Stocks, who had the kindness and humanity to send me a bunch of flowers whilst I was recuperating in hospital from the effects of smoke inhilation and stab wounds. I would also like to thank her very much for being the only person of the twenty or so gathered round me that evening to pull Brian off of me and then telephone for an ambulance when I politely but firmly requested,

'Can somebody please pull Brian off of me and then telephone for an ambulance?' 

At this juncture I feel as though I must bring this communication to a close. I do very much hope that it will be possible for you to speak to Brian at some point in the not too distant future. Partly because I will be getting out of hospital in a few days and therefore the ban that Chiswick Hospital instigated against Brian in August 1997 preventing him from coming with an approximate distance of five kilometres from that place will mean that I will no longer have a buffer zone around me. The other reason is that I do feel, and many of my friends concur with this, that for some reason Brian is in fact trying to kill me.

Whilst I appreciate that this entire matter should be dealt with by the appropriate authorities i.e. Thames Valley Police and not as you suggested in your previous communication 'Dimplex Wall Heaters' I have felt that contacting Thames Valley Police would be a futile gesture and one that would only exacerbate the current relationship between myself and Brian. I say this because as you well know Brian is in fact deputy Chief Superintendant of that Constabulary.


I look forward to hearing from you at your earliest convenience.


Mark