🌫️ Wednesday Witterings with Virgil Twobyfour 🌫️

“If you’re the cleverest man in the room, you’re in the wrong room - unless you’re in the kitchen with Professor Dr M.”

I've been spending rather a lot of time lately in the warm and profoundly overfurnished company of the Little Country’s most esteemed polymath, Professor Doctor Montague-Montague-Mole (or “Triple-M” as Young Keith calls him, although not to his face, having once done so and been politely dismantled with a withering look and a nine-minute explanation of the Latin origins of the phrase “cheeky oik”).

Triple-M has more letters after his name than a victorious triple-word score in Welsh Scrabble, and even his cat is a visiting fellow. His body is 80% tweed, 10% elbow patch, 7% pipe smoke and 3% Madeira cake. He’s a man who speaks twelve languages, none of them modern, and once translated a 14th-century manuscript using only a jam jar and a spoon.

We’ve been meeting on Tuesdays (or “Woden’s Day, Adjusted” as he insists on calling it) to discuss a number of pressing metaphysical concerns. Topics so far have included:

The possible correlation between bunting and the curvature of time.

Whether hedges have memory.

If owls dream in Latin.

And the quantum instability of scones when jam is applied before cream (this caused an actual argument, resulting in the temporary loss of visibility due to pipe-related fog).

Being in his presence is rather like being caught in an unexpected downpour of facts. You’re damp with enlightenment before you realise you forgot to pack an umbrella of understanding. One minute you’re mentioning how the postbox has been making a funny clanging noise, and the next he’s describing the evolutionary development of cast-iron acoustics in pre-war England.

He told me the other day that my potting shed exhibits unusual “dimensional misbehaviour” and has offered to run a few harmless tests involving a series of tuning forks, a vintage dictaphone, and a hedgehog. I said he could, as long as he left the slug pellets alone and didn’t get Madeira crumbs in my mothballs.

He’s also been helping me devise an accurate astrological chart for local cows. This is part of our ongoing attempt to refine a horoscope system based on ruminant behaviour and the alignment of the village church weather vane. It’s early days, but we believe there may be a troubling conjunction approaching involving a Friesian, a crescent moon, and Mrs Dibble’s broken greenhouse pane.

When I asked him why he continues to live in the Little Country despite frequent invitations from every major university on the planet (and a minor one on the moon), he simply replied:

"Because nowhere else has such excellent jam, such oddly-shaped clouds, or a bus service that runs entirely on rumours."

Frankly, I couldn’t argue with that.

Yours in half-understood wonder,
Virgil T.
“Somewhere between a puzzle and a pasty”