A street of light will screem, the black chariot of the Serpente will flayme, and a Queene wille sing quickfilveres songes no moar.
Most of the family had gone along with Gelatly Device, who wrote a brief monograph in the 1830s explaining it as a metaphor for the banishment of Weishaupt’s Illuminati from Bavaria in 1785.
50 This was true. There wasn’t a thermometer on earth that could have been persuaded to register both 700°C and -140°C at the same time, which was the correct temperature.
51 He did not have a television. Or as his wife put it, “Ronald wouldn’t have one of those things in the house, would you Ronald?” and he always agreed, although secretly he would have liked to have seen some of the smut and filth and violence that the National Viewers and Listeners Association complained of. Not because he wanted to see it, of course. Just because he wanted to know what other people should be protected from.
52 Although as a member (read, founder) of his local Neighborhood Watch scheme he did attempt to memorize the motorbikes’ number plates.
53 Five foot six.
54 He’d slipped and fallen in a hotel shower when he took a holiday there in 1983. Now the mere sight of a bar of yellow soap could send him into near-fatal flashbacks.
55 Except for Giovanni Jacopo Casanova (1725–1798), famed amourist and litterateur, who revealed in volume 12 of his Memoirs that, as a matter of course, he carried around with him at all times a small valise containing “a loaf of bread, a pot of choice Seville marmalade, a knife, fork, and small spoon for stirring, 2 fresh eggs packed with care in unspun wool, a tomato or love-apple, a small frying pan, a small sauce pan, a spirit burner, a chafing dish, a tin box of salted butter of the Italian type, 2 bone china plates. Also a portion of honey comb, as a sweetener, for my breath and for my coffee. Let my readers understand me when I say to them all: A true gentleman should always be able to break his fast in the manner of a gentleman, wheresoever he may find himself.”
56 And there was the matter of Dick Turpin. It looked like the same car, except that forever afterwards it seemed able to do 250 miles on a gallon of petrol, ran so quietly that you practically had to put your mouth over the exhaust pipe to see if the engine was firing, and issued its voice-synthesized warnings in a series of exquisite and perfectly phrased haikus, each one original and apt …
Late frost burns the bloom
Would a fool not let the belt
Restrain the body?
. . . it would say. And,
The cherry blossom
Tumbles from the highest tree.
One needs more petrol.
57 Witchfinder Corporal Carpet, librarian, 11 pence per annum bonus.
58 “A relentlefs blockbufter of a boke; heartily recommended”—Pope Innocent VIII.
59 To the right collector, the Witchfinder Army’s library would have been worth millions. The right collector would have to have been very rich, and not have minded gravy stains, cigarette burns, marginal notations, or the late Witchfinder Lance Corporal Wotling’s passion for drawing mustaches and spectacles on all woodcut illustrations of witches and demons.