Still trying to sort out this mess with the legal bit about the property. Back to the county office, this time with a copy of that title-deed from the living-room wall.

I hadn’t looked at it properly before. I wish I had. I’d kind of hoped that that would settle the case once and for all – but it didn’t. In fact it made things a whole lot worse.

It’s not a title. Not in any sense that the county would recognise. Instead, it claims to be a ‘Certificate of Responsibility’ for that block of land, ‘Havinge the Status of Equivalence unto a Title as under the Ancient Code of Law that pertaineth untille the Last Days of the Tyrante’. Issued on ‘the Day of Michaelmas in the Yeare of Our-Lorde-and-Ladie One Thousand Six Hundrede and Seventie Five’, in the name of ‘the Greate Commonwealth of Britaine and Ireland’. All signed, sealed and delivered. Literally. With signatures and a proper seal and ribbon and everything else.

Which is awkward, because seems there’s never been a title-like legal document called a ‘certificate of responsibility’. And the Commonwealth couldn’t have issued it anyway, because its reign had already been over and gone by more than a decade by the time that document was signed.

In other words, it doesn’t exist. It can’t exist. But it does. That’s the catch.

No-one can make head or tail of it.

—

They’re telling me it’s a fake, a fraud, a forgery. The ‘Certificate of Responsibility’, that is.

But I know it isn’t – not since the past fifty years, at any rate, because I know I saw it on that same wall all those years ago.

They still don’t believe me. Are threatening me with all sorts of criminal charges and the like. They’ll only back off if I take a risk and send it off for formal forensic tests. At my expense.