One day, Mr Jones was feeling a bit bored, so he decided to sell his soul to the Devil. However, the easiness with which he hoped this would come about proved much overestimated.

This was not for want of effort. Mr Jones spent considerable time researching suitable ways to achieve his end. He tried running widdershins around his parish church after sunset on a Friday the thirteenth, but had no luck. He read numerous versions of the Faust story and looked up all the references to Satan in the county library. He even joined the book club run by the local Devil-worshipping society; he read elbiB yloH ehT, one of the three purchases he was allowed to order before having to subscribe to their quarterly magazine, from cover to cover, he read An A-Z of Witch Groups in the British Isles from coven to coven, and he used to say the Lord’s Prayer backwards every night before going to sleep, but none of this worked either.

He bought lots of candles and set about converting his living room into an environment fit to welcome Mephistopheles. He removed the sofa and both armchairs. He ripped out the carpet and changed the floorboards to ebony, and he was pleased to note that the new ones creaked in a most agreeably sinister way. He stripped off the primrose-snowdrop beach-hut-striped wallpaper and painted the walls and ceiling in Pitch Black. With the candles he did not need the light, so he took it down. Having done this, he decided the centre of the ceiling looked bare, so he installed a modest, not-too-expensive chandelier in its place. This gave him great pride, especially after he had inserted candles into each of the mounts. When lit, these filled the room with shadows, the effect of which Mr Jones liked very much. To increase it, he brought down some blackout blinds kept in his loft since the air raids of the Second World War, and put them up instead of his old orange curtains.

He moved all his electrical goods, including the television, DVD player and hi-fi to the dining room. He also moved there most of the trinkets friends and relations had given him on their return from holiday –a Palekh box, an ornamental plate from Pisa, and a chessboard from Samarkand, as well as examples of currency from Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, Latvia, Uruguay, Egypt, Oman, Namibia, Niger, Andorra, the Belgian Congo, Zaire, the Central African Republic, Honduras, Burundi, Mexico, France, Denmark, Kazakstan, Malta, Laos, Moldova, Turkey, Afghanistan, Mongolia, Singapore, Albania, Formosa, Tanganyika, Chile, Venezuela, Bolivia, Norway, England, Brazil, Iraq, Sweden, Argentina, Iran, São Tomé e Principe, Somalia, Australia, Tuvalu, Mali, Paraguay, Senegal and Equatorial Guinea. He moved his pot plants to the dining room too; he purchased some new and, to his mind, more appropriate ones (dumb cane, oleander and assorted cacti) to replace them in the lounge.