For those who didn't manage to keep up. Previously on this thread, perhaps better entitled One Man's Intellectual Journey from Joyce's Finnegans Wake to Dan Brown's Inferno, we've divined a profundity of meaning in cheese-stuffed pizza crusts, and galloped a tussled unicorn through the story of the little sparkly Jesus as told in the Book of Kevin. There were men in tights. There often are, and that can't be helped. Enid Blyton was stabbed in the eye with a fork. There were claims she did it to herself. Harsh and unfair words were uttered about cupcakes. We learned about the economics of second hand paperback sales and the fact that somewhere out there, a mountainous pile of Da Vinci Codes are waiting to fall on us. Precarious. Was that why Enid did it? Fortunately, we found a hardbitten detective to take up the case. Well, he would, but he's neck-deep in Ford Maddox Ford and sweating words like last night's whisky, so it's going to take a while for him to get on the Enid case. While we were waiting, so much time was spent in the contemplation of freckles, likely the same amount of time it would take a for a lazy cat to stretch itself to infinity. Until, of course, that cat happened to spy Flaubert's parrot on its perch across the room, and snapped us back to a reality in a fury of black fur and green feather. Dumping us in a hard place where a freckle just is a freckle and green eyes are just green, not verdigris pebbles in the pillow of her face, unless of course those green eyes belong to Madame Bovary, and she's not sure. It seems neither are we. We found out that the Louvre pyramid had fewer, or perhaps more panes, of glass than we'd previously believed. There was one fewer when some English chap, probably not in Harris Tweeds, flung a copy of Captain Corelli's Mandolin through one, undoubtedly with the sinuously reflexive arm motion of an Olympian discus thrower completing for the glory of Zeus himself. As a result of this rash yet not entirely undeserved act, somewhere in the bowels of the Louvre, under those enigmatic watchful verdigris eyes of Leonardo's painted lady herself, a museum curator looks down the barrel of a gun. Literally down, it would seem, as he's facing a furious albino midget, who with the roseate glow of his thinning long white hair, cast like a halo in the subdued museum light, might just be the very angel flung from heaven, and cursed to the pit – or at least the basement level of the Louvre, where of course they display Da Vinci's most famous painting – for his sins against paradise. Sins that amounted to the seraphim catching him trying to hide a copy of Angels and Demons under his pillow. Alas, it seems our detective is submerging himself in another glass but the evidence has it that Enid did it to herself. Another copy of Angels and Demons was found nearby. In the Louvre basement a gun is cocked and an albino midget takes aim and squeezes the trigger, slowly. The bullet cuts wide, making a small perfect hole right between those enigmatic painted eyes. The albino midget lies sprawled, the gun arm awry, blood tricking from his scalp. By this head a copy of Captain Corelli's Mandolin flaps open in the draft of the air conditioning.
So that's were we are. Now Ben T and Bledlow are squaring up for the intellectual spat of the decade. We should broadcast this, it's actually even more fun than Martin Amis having an argument with his own reflection.
