Sentence The Twohundredandseventeenth
And so it was that Dr Frangible Arbuthnot, passing by on his way to visit his clandestine inamorata Miss Mona Lott, understudy to Dame Parma Violet Hammnett currently appearing in The Gadfly by George Bernard Shaw at The Festival Theatre, just happened, while considering the sorry lot of the poor who find themselves in the Welfare Trap through no fault of their own and wondering if he could construct a variation of the Rorsach Test - which was his daily bread and butter, as it were – which might address this most difficult of conundra, to see the vehicle glide sedately off the tarmac, push through a thinned-out hedgerow, cross a field and come to rest in a tangle of branches and leaves on the other side, at which point Dr Arbuthnot felt and smelt danger in the air, which was why it was not he who climbed out from his rather old, battered and gouged Citroen 2CV, but rather the Pink Tutu-clad Super Hero, The Gadfly, and it was this renowned Defender if the Faith and Scourge of Hoodlums and their Molls whom he diligently drove from the Mean Streets of this Noble City, home of John Knox and Morningside Maisie, from Westerhailes to Craigmillar, Colinton Dell to Duddingston, who pushed through the flattened hedgerow, crossed the field – meeting the gaze of
somnolent cows – and arrived at the car presently lodged in the bushes on the far side; it was The Gadfly who heaved open the driver's door, with a great groan of distorted metal scraping on the frame, and with an affectious cry of “hello there, me old pal, me old beauty, what are you doing here?” peered inside at the driver: a big-built man, with a strongly-featured face, presently disfigured by the blood which was still running from a severe trauma to the crown of his head, high over the tops of his ears, indeed The Gadfly quickly assessed the situation as grave and told the semi-conscious driver that he would telephone for an ambulance from The Steading, just a short distance along the road; but the driver, evidently trying to speak and failing, producing only a mumbled jumble of sounds, managed to drag a mobile telephone from his jacket and thrust it at The Gadfly, who pressed the buttons for 999 and requested an Ambulance and Police – and perhaps the Fire Brigade, lest the unknown driver need to be cut out of the vehicle – and he advised the driver of
what he had done, then took himself up to the road, so that he could direct the emergency vehicles through the hedge, there being no gate at that end of the field, and all this time the cows steadily chewed their cud and watched him, with an apparent appearance of superficially studied indifference,
but who could have known what shared thoughts floated between the half-dozen Belted Galloways as they surveyed the scene and the human actors who had disturbed their ruminating, but also reached a decision among themselves and as The Gadfly stared along the road, manfully resisting a wave of lassitude, which caused even his normally ebullient nature to sink a little through lack of sugar in his bloodstream, keeping Lookout for vehicles approaching from the direction of Edinburgh, and munching on a Cornish Chicken Tikka Masala Pasty for the umami which fair tingled his taste buds, swept over him so that he missed what happened next in the field and would spend the following seven or eight years of his life on a futile re-winding and re-playing in his mind of the exact sequence of events in and around the field insofar as he was able, but always coming to the correct conclusion that he had missed something and for the life of him he could not quite work out what it was!
And so it was that Dr Frangible Arbuthnot, passing by on his way to visit his clandestine inamorata Miss Mona Lott, understudy to Dame Parma Violet Hammnett currently appearing in The Gadfly by George Bernard Shaw at The Festival Theatre, just happened, while considering the sorry lot of the poor who find themselves in the Welfare Trap through no fault of their own and wondering if he could construct a variation of the Rorsach Test - which was his daily bread and butter, as it were – which might address this most difficult of conundra, to see the vehicle glide sedately off the tarmac, push through a thinned-out hedgerow, cross a field and come to rest in a tangle of branches and leaves on the other side, at which point Dr Arbuthnot felt and smelt danger in the air, which was why it was not he who climbed out from his rather old, battered and gouged Citroen 2CV, but rather the Pink Tutu-clad Super Hero, The Gadfly, and it was this renowned Defender if the Faith and Scourge of Hoodlums and their Molls whom he diligently drove from the Mean Streets of this Noble City, home of John Knox and Morningside Maisie, from Westerhailes to Craigmillar, Colinton Dell to Duddingston, who pushed through the flattened hedgerow, crossed the field – meeting the gaze of
somnolent cows – and arrived at the car presently lodged in the bushes on the far side; it was The Gadfly who heaved open the driver's door, with a great groan of distorted metal scraping on the frame, and with an affectious cry of “hello there, me old pal, me old beauty, what are you doing here?” peered inside at the driver: a big-built man, with a strongly-featured face, presently disfigured by the blood which was still running from a severe trauma to the crown of his head, high over the tops of his ears, indeed The Gadfly quickly assessed the situation as grave and told the semi-conscious driver that he would telephone for an ambulance from The Steading, just a short distance along the road; but the driver, evidently trying to speak and failing, producing only a mumbled jumble of sounds, managed to drag a mobile telephone from his jacket and thrust it at The Gadfly, who pressed the buttons for 999 and requested an Ambulance and Police – and perhaps the Fire Brigade, lest the unknown driver need to be cut out of the vehicle – and he advised the driver of
what he had done, then took himself up to the road, so that he could direct the emergency vehicles through the hedge, there being no gate at that end of the field, and all this time the cows steadily chewed their cud and watched him, with an apparent appearance of superficially studied indifference,
but who could have known what shared thoughts floated between the half-dozen Belted Galloways as they surveyed the scene and the human actors who had disturbed their ruminating, but also reached a decision among themselves and as The Gadfly stared along the road, manfully resisting a wave of lassitude, which caused even his normally ebullient nature to sink a little through lack of sugar in his bloodstream, keeping Lookout for vehicles approaching from the direction of Edinburgh, and munching on a Cornish Chicken Tikka Masala Pasty for the umami which fair tingled his taste buds, swept over him so that he missed what happened next in the field and would spend the following seven or eight years of his life on a futile re-winding and re-playing in his mind of the exact sequence of events in and around the field insofar as he was able, but always coming to the correct conclusion that he had missed something and for the life of him he could not quite work out what it was!
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