Little Pudding Manor

Little Pudding Manor, Lesser Pudding, is not the ancestral home of the Arcoses. It was won in a crooked game of poker some fifteen years ago, and I only recently retired to it, leaving the palatial mansion in Los Angeles to younger members of the family.

As can be seen from this photograph, the house looks old. It was built in the gothic style in 1850 just behind the medieval manor house, which was demolished afterwards on the grounds that it didn't look medieval enough.

The gardens are laid to lawn, with large and deep flowerbeds for the disposal of corpses. Behind the house is man-trap wood, named for its predominant feature. These are not designed to keep out poachers, as there is no game in the woods, only a large and very savage jaguar which is smart enough to avoid the man-traps.

There is also a mad old man who lives in the ice-house. He used to work for the Inland Revenue, but we locked him in the ice-house when he suggested we might have to pay tax. The other two were eaten by the jaguar, and since then we have been a tax-exempt charitable organisation.

The lodge cottage is ruined, and another madman lives there. He spends his days looking for the gas-meters in the village. Apparently twelve years ago British Gas sent him to read the gas meters in the village, not telling him that the village had no gas. The impaled man above the manor gates was selling vacum cleaners door-to-door and was mistaken for a witch.