Wasn't until I was eight that my mum finally explained to me why this was.
She began by saying that I was never allowed to sit there - that chair wasn't meant for the living.
It came from an old family story about a day when a man made of bones and tar came to the house.
He spoke in a deep booming voice that seemed to come from a foot or so above his head.
Didn't have any skin, so to speak, just stringy tar draped around his crumbling frame.
He asked for a chair to sit on every night, to rest his old bones.
My great something Grandad was the only person to agree to this.
We've had the chair ever since.
I haven't seen the bone man yet but my mum assures me that I will eventually.
She first saw it when she was involved in a car accident back in 1975.
Came home and saw him hunched in Grandad's chair, breath rasping out like tin cans in a storm.
Most of my relatives can see him for one reason or another, usually an accident of some kind.
All my life they've talked to Grandad's chair and the bone man who rests there.
Sometimes I catch glimpses of him but he doesn't look anything like they describe.
See, my family have all agreed that he's bones and stringy ropes of tar holding him in one piece.
From the brief moments I've seen him he looks like lumps of leather poorly sewn together.
His head is always turned to face me apparently, my family say it's because he likes me.
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