Nigel Update! Nigel Update! Here come the men in black…

Folks, there has been a development in the mysterious case of Nigel, the International Man of Mystery Next Door.

It’s not much of a development, to be honest. In fact, if you just clicked through from Twitter, or wherever, hoping for some kind of juicy development, you may just feel you’ve had a wasted trip, because this development actually happened last week, and was so insignificant that I totally forgot to mention it. In the interests of keeping an accurate account of the comings and goings next door (or, er, the goings and staying gones, as the case may be), and also in case one day the police need to use this blog as evidence, let the record show that, last week, Nigel had visitors. Two of them.

I say Nigel had visitors. Obviously he didn’t, because he isn’t there. So Terry and I took it upon ourselves to speak to these visitors. You know, as nosey good neighbours do.

The two men arrived by car, and spent a few minutes sitting outside, observing the house. Terry happened to be passing the window at the time, and this activity instantly triggered his “Nigel” sensor, so he called me over, and together we watched the men get out of their vehicle and approach Nigel’s door. Both men were wearing dark suits, and looked a bit like the Men in Black, only without the talking dog, which was a bit of a shame, because that would’ve made for an AWESOME blog post, no?

Anyway, no sooner had they knocked on the door than Terry was out of the house and headed towards them. (I’d have gone with him, but I was just back from the gym and out of the shower, so I was wearing my dressing gown and a towel turban at the time…) Sadly, however, Terry’s Nancy Drew skills are less finely honed than mine, possibly because he has never been a 12 year old girl, so he didn’t manage to get much more information out of the visitors other than that the usual, “When did you last see him? Does he ever come back to the house? What, NEVER?” Terry was left with the strong impression that they were debt-collectors, or similar. I’m still convinced they were, you know, galaxy defenders, but I do have a pretty active imagination, so maybe not.

What this proves, however, other than that Terry and I would be useless detectives, is that wherever Nigel is right now, and whatever he’s doing there, not everyone in his life knows about it. He appears to have left some loose ends behind him, shall we say, and obviously if this was a novel, this would be the part where Terry and I (and possibly Rubin, because never underestimate the importance of a dog when it comes to solving mysteries) tie up those loose ends into a nice, neat little bow. It’s just a blog, though, so I’m going to have to leave you to try and tie them up yourselves. Enjoy!

P.S. I had to switch comment moderation back on this week, but I totally forgot to tell the site to notify me when comments came in, which means they’ve all been sitting in the moderation queue for a couple of days. If you posted a comment in that time, sorry, I wasn’t ignoring you – it should have been approved now!