Every Home Should Have an Ugly Nobleman

 

The Professor’s wish list is a fairly strange phenomenon. We had a bit of a morning off on Saturday: the plan had been to celebrate Dr Brennan’s birthday with the Huntly Two and the infant Hercules, but Fate intervened in that something horrible went wrong with Dr B’s car. He phoned from the environs of Dundee, where he had been coming up from Sunderland, with plans to scoop up his older son en route, and it all had to be cancelled – so the other of the Huntly Two and her mother came and spent Friday night with us, and Saturday was unexpectedly free. We went to take a look at the good Scottish craft shop, and there, among all the tweed and glass, was a lifesized plaster bust of an ugly nobleman. Actually, not hideous, certainly not in the Giangastone de’Medici class, but merely a Victorian fellow with a curly moustache, wearing a plaid – Lord McSomebody, doubtless. I’d pretty much forgotten that the Professor once tried to buy such a busto at a sale in Edinburgh, with the assistance of the ex-Tropical Uncle, and was pretty miffed to be balked of his prey. Anyhow, it transpired that he still wanted one, and a bit of further investigation revealed that Lord McSomething was to be had jolly cheap, so we bought him. He needs a certain amount of restoration, but once tidied up, the idea is that he will go at the end of the hall under the octagonal mirror, and Add Tone. Which I’m sure he will. He will not be given an old cricket cap, a form of Artlessness, which is, in our view, long past its sell-by date. Having bundled him into the car, we then went on to visit an antique shop which has produced interesting things in the past. On this occasion, the most interesting thing turned out to be the proprietor. In the course of general chatting, it turned out that he and the Professor shared a passionate interest in a local worthy who became a gay Jacobite art-dealer in eighteenth-century Rome, and he had some interesting bits of information about how stuff had moved from one big house to another in the area, which is the sort of thing an antique dealer gets to know about. All of which goes to show that you never know what will happen when you get talking to people.