There is one Forbidden Zone, a Dark Place into which Django cannot look, cannot go. Car boot sales. He is, let’s face it, a bumbling, easy going dog, but he is a piddler extraordinaire. I stand by shops and pretend I don’t know him as he pees down someone’s advertising sign, or heads straight for the display outside the expensive florists. So car boots are a no-no for him. I cannot rummage through the contents of someone’s garage at a leisurely pace knowing that at any minute he’s going to water a box of vintage vinyl collectables.

We go to these events dogless, therefore, throughout the summer, and dig deep. My great joy is the hunting down and capture of old audiotapes. It’s a CD/mp3+ world, and so people gradually offload their stretched, half-magnetised audiobooks, usually into my waiting hands. Car boots are also wonderful for haggling, which I love. The thrill of getting fifty pence knocked off a tatty out-of-print paperback must be the same feeling achieved thousands of years ago, when you saw a mammoth trip over and told your tribe that you did that. Ah, that hunting instinct, finely honed through years of savaging innocent cardboard boxes on a Sunday morning…

Not that it’s relevant, but we also try and pick car boot sales where you can get a cup of tea and a bacon sandwich, with lots of brown sauce, so that we get a healthy balanced breakfast at the same time.

Horror and ghost story audiotapes are my primary prey, as you might expect, for many tapes are no longer available commercially. I love the hiss and thunk of a cassette tape ploughing its way along, and the happy hours spent rewinding one with a pencil, or trying to get the end of the tape back into the spool bit. Yes, I could get the digital download of some of them for my gas-powered computer, but it’s not the same. Making fancy bread, pizza dough and a bloody great sink-the-Bismark fruit cake? Set yourself up in the kitchen with an audiotape, and drift into baking bliss. Flour everywhere, feral brown dogs trying to steal the ingredients and something spine-shivery in the background.

Vincent Price, for example, reading The Speciality of the House, or Christopher Lee’s rendition of The Monkey’s Paw. The Room in the Tower by E F Benson, or one of Saki’s unpleasant little understated stories. Patricia Hodge reading Black Dog by Penelope Lively. All good.

I adore Vincent Price’s range, his ability to convey menace in quite soft tones, never needing to overdo it. The Price of Fear is a great series, well worth getting if you can. And Christopher Lee must be familiar to you anyway, with those deep tones which make you shiver.

Even better than audiotape, how many people here have got a copy of The King of Elfand’s Daughter LP on vinyl? A concept by two members of Steeleye “All Around my Cat” Span, the album not only has Mary Hopkins (!) and Alexis Corner, amongst others, but features Christopher Lee as the Elf-King himself.

“Why should my daughter be taken by pitiless time? This… Shall… Not… Be!”

Stunning stuff. I can’t say I like every song, but Christopher does deliver his part. I’m sure Lord Dunsany, the original author, would be tapping his toes to it, had he not died in 1957.

My favourite modern narrator, as mentioned weeks ago in Horror without Wires, is Wayne June. He reads, amongst other things, a great series called The Dark Worlds of H P Lovecraft, which really do the job. Six CDs or downloads of HPL’s creepy stories, about 20 hours (I’m guessing) of something nasty in the brain-shed. Inasmuch as I would ever recommend anything to my innocent, trusting listeners, I back these to the hilt.

(Which is odd for me, because I don’t like being told what to like. I deliberately buy strangely-named cheap toothpaste with arabic writing on it in order to take my stand against TV adverts, for example. “No, I’m not a dentist, but my white coat makes it clear that I know more about toothpaste than you do.” Bugger off. It’s my mouth. The rest of my teeth are going to fall out without the insidious influence of multi-global corporations, thank you very much.)

But I lost track there (or a number of tracks). Wayne June conveys menace without shouting at you, by letting it sink in instead. I don’t mind the odd horror film where everyone shrieks “I’m very upset! And “This is BADBADBAD!” but when you have audio only, you want his beautifully paced narration telling you just how awfully worrying things are, or are about to become.

So it’s official – Wayne June is more scary than seeing your rye and seed dough collapse right before you put it in the oven.

Or Django edging inches closer to someone’s perfect display of antique porcelain and slowly, slowly cocking his leg…