Countless years ago, when we first met, she told me that all days were defined by combinations of colours. She insisted that days of rest should always be blue and green.
Some years ago the Professor's work “Sylvan Ascendance” caused a considerable amount of perturbation almost amounting to a prototypical brouhaha. The question of how apparent levitation could be achieved was discussed at length by art critics, aeronautical engineers, savants and other rampallions. In preparation for this work, the Professor was known to have instigated a process of non dualist meditation and trampolining but was also rumoured to have been seen installing a system of wires and hoists. He now refuses to discuss this brief period of his life in any way. Although one night shortly before the last winter solstice, following a tasting of aged Calvados, he did disclose to me in confidence that, “I'm damned if I could remember how to get the unfortunate participants down again.” Shortly after this mystifying spectacle, the Professor moved on to take up the post of Principal Curator of Unexplained Trinkets at the Pudleston Bauble Museum.
Uncle Leucocholy's entry into Paris has become legendary, possibly because he took disproportionate delight in telling and retelling the story to anyone who could be persuaded to listen. “Oh, the dark meetings on the Champs-Elysées,” he would mutter, darkly. He sidestepped questions about why he descended by parachute. “Ah, the faces looking up at me from the crowd. Bien sûr, Pierre and Guillaume,” he would enthuse. He adamantly refused to explain the suit of armour or his reasons for being in the city at all. "Ha ha," he would exclaim, reconditely. Despite the cloud of ambiguity that invariably surrounded him, everywhere that Uncle Leucocholy ventured, people would be inclined to cry “Hooray!”. There are many things in this world that I do not understand.
While, once again, trying to establish some degree of order in the Professor's papers, I came across a number of old postcards of Paris concealed beneath a biography of Evelyn Rockley Wilson. The Professor leafed through the fading cards and, of course, began one his anecdotes: “These cards remind me hardly at all of my meeting with Daniel Brereton in Paris one autumn evening. He'd just finished working his shift at ‘Le Maillot de Lumière’, the bar somewhere in Le Marais.” “He's no bartender,” I suggested. The Professor ignored my interruption and went on, “We strolled though a local park of fountains. As we walked on we became so deeply absorbed in a discussion concerning the diligence of lightning that we paid no attention to our surroundings. Eventually we looked around and were surprised to find ourselves facing a castle that had no meaning at all.” “He's no bartender,” I repeated.
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