Beware of the Owls!

And another....

It just so happened that this school trip to Crete took place shortly before the final episode of 'Twin Peaks' was due to be screened in the UK. That series was a particular favourite of mine (and, bizarrely, also of my father - just about the only taste we ever shared!), and had acquired quite a cult following among the older students at the boarding school where I was a live-in teacher. Two of my teaching colleagues had become lumbered with somewhat unflattering nicknames derived from the show - Killer Bob and The Log Lady - but I.... I was (briefly!) Agent Cooper, after Kyle McLachlan's quirky but ultra-cool FBI investigator.

So desperate was I not to miss the denouement of this landmark TV series that I had set my own VHS machine to record it, and the school's machine in the Audio-Visual Aids Room, and had made my parents swear to tape it and keep it for me, and had wrung similar promises from at least two of my friends. A number of my favourite students accompanying me on the trip had gone to similar lengths - but we were all in a state of high anxiety that all of these plans might miscarry and that we might somehow miss out on seeing how the story concluded.

I have to admit, we were pitifully obsessed. We were swapping catchphrases or discussing favourite moments from the show almost incessantly. For those of us who were aficionados, cultists, it became an irresistible running joke through the holiday; for our travelling companions who did not share our consuming enthusiasm, it must soon have become a terrible bore. (It didn't help that McLachlan had just started appearing in a series of TV ads - in his Agent Cooper persona, or a 'non-IPR infringing' facsimile of it - for Ruffles, an American brand of ridged crisps [or 'potato chips', if you must, my US readers] newly launched in Britain...... and we found Ruffles to be a ubiquitous brand in Crete, and thus an easy stimulus to yet more 'Twin Peaks' banter.)

After a few days - on the momentous day on which the last episode was to be screened in our absence, when our nerves were at their tautest - we took pity on our beleaguered 'non-TP' friends, and, at my instigation, we, the fans, all tried to embrace a self-imposed moratorium on further references to the show.

It lasted all of about 2hrs.

We stopped high up in the mountains somewhere for a mid-morning stroll around a monastery which enjoyed a local claim to fame as a sort of Cretan Alamo, the scene of some little-known, suicidal stand against someone or other (the Turks, probably) a century or so before. On entering the large adjacent giftshop and convenience store afterwards, we encountered an unnerving spectacle. Fellow enthusiasts of 'Twin Peaks' will doubtless recall that the owls in the woods were sinister harbingers of something or other, possibly 'familiars' channelling the evil spirits from The Black Lodge; the mystical Log Lady was stern in her repeated warnings, "The owls are not what they seem." - one of the most memorable lines from the whole series. This remote Cretan gift shop displayed a large selection of stuffed animals. Nearly all birds. In fact, almost exclusively owls. More stuffed owls thant you would ever expect to see in your entire life. It was very, very spooky. Ed, my favourite student and fellow 'Twin Peaks' nutter, clocked this bizarre apparition with the same stunned disbelief as me; the other 'Peakies' in our party slowly gathered round us in silent awe. We continued speechless - but fighting a doomed battle against helpless corpsing - for several minutes as we reboarded the coach, got under way again. Then Ed turned to me across the aisle and asked, "Are you going to say it, or shall I?" Moments later, half of the coach spontaneously chorused with one voice, "THE OWLS ARE NOT WHAT THEY SEEM!!!"

Maybe you had to be there.....