It’s a Wonderful Day for an Auto da Fé

Last Friday, Dr Brennan the Artist and the junior half of the Huntly Two swooped by for the night (the older of the Huntly Two was otherwise engaged). We had a jolly evening, as usual, talking about art (Huntly 2² is interested in Sargent), and this and that, fuelled, in the case of Dr Brennan and myself, by not a little tasty Montepulciano. This may explain why, when he eventually went to bed, he failed to observe that a Twisby had crawled up the bedside lamp and was squinnying menacingly out of the top of the shade. Twisbies are of course entirely synthetic, so he was alerted to this fact by a horrid smell some time later. The result of all this is that the resident Twisby has a hemispherical hole in its saggy and regrettable stomach, also a neat round hole in its grey outer integument. We have tried to tell it that it is still better off than the Twisby which went to Kuala Lumpur with the Godparents, took to consulting black magicians, and was handed over to the secular arm. Or possibly the Muslim arm, it being Kuala Lumpur, but whichever it was it was pretty dashed vengeful. We are left in a slight quandary, with respect to our own hollowed-out Twisby. Do we re stuff, and repair it with fabric which doesn’t quite match, which will not improve its temper, or carry on the good work …? Or teach it to intone ‘we are the hollow men  …’, etcetera, to upset our guests? Meanwhile, I have possibly fallen victim to malign influences of a Twisbotic nature, because I have caught a cold. This may on the other hand have a perfectly natural explanation, the sheer shock to the immune system of meeting about 50 people after a shy and retiring summer in which I scarcely met anyone at all. Whichever, it seems to be passing over quite fast as colds go, all of which suggests that it was a really good idea to go on holiday last month.