A Class Act

A Class Act

So there we were, sat in this crowded room full of extreme hyper-intelligence, all jostling together like magnets. The rain was lashing down outside and the wind was bisecting people, which meant the windows were shut tight and the heating racked up to nine million point five.

In one corner sits Tony, our speaker. He is a tallish heavy set man of around fifty-five wearing a black suit, probably quite expensive, and black shoes. He is of the sub-species ginger, with fleshy lips rather like those one would imagine on the face of a purveyor of fairground attractions from the Victorian era. He wears trendy black glasses, probably Hugo Boss, rectangular, and his hair is not grey at all, but a gingery brown. Ginger types are extraordinary in one way or another. Beware the ginger, when the moon is fat...

What strikes me about the members of staff of this department is how seriously they take each other and themselves. It is a self-reinforcing clique; they re-assure each other with mutual respect. This guy is Oxford, classics, Shakespeare and Donne, Spencer and Milton, but he was tracing the bequests of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, even Pythagoras for chrissakkes!! He knew his stuff, for sure...the sum of the angle on the hypoteneuse...it's all Greek to me...I felt insignificant, which is good for me, and said nothing, which is also good for me, and just soaked up how they act and talk to one another...all so incredibly high-brow.

Anyway, so there I am, listening to this intellectual giant, watching a fat bluebottle (let's call it Jeff) drunkenly gambolling across some low tables on which drops of a sugary drink had been spilled. Jeff took off again, buzzed lazily past the faces of formerly-attentive listeners, making a series of low strafing runs across the irritated heads, attracted by sweet sweaty scent to him or to her, creating lepers wantonly...and I'm psychic; I just knew every single one of them was itching to terminate the frightful thing but didn't want to act in a manner not fitting to their dignified stations...I was willing someone to leap up, crouching tiger stylie, and swat that goddamned brute from the soil-pipe of Hades (who, Jeff?) and making a glorious squishy mess with an athletic full-rotation 360 degree backhand smash for good measure. That would have been a fitting end for a fly of Jeff's stature; he was already immortal. I thought about, as Jeff landed on someone's half-empty wine-glass, how he had been...probably...sucking on a lump of cack somewhere or another in the last few hours...

and then I thought about William Blake, and his marvellous poem 'The Fly'...

Little fly
Thy summer's play
My thoughtless hand
Does brush away

Am not I
A fly like thee
Or art not thou
A man like Me

For I dance
And drink, and sing
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing

If thought is life
And strength and breath
And the want
of thought is death

Then am I
A happy fly
If I live
Or if I die

That made me think really hard, especially about Descartes, but, being the psychopsychic that I am, I still wanted to give Jeff the old wham-bam-splat-thanks-me-old-mucker treatment. However, in such eminent company, I'm afraid I blue-bottled it; I just didn't have the chutzpah...

Meanwhile, Jeff did what flies do....he landed on the edge of someone else's glass, threw up on some sugar coating the rim and sucked it up again...divine backwash...cackwash even...and, just as Tony was drawing the seminar to a succinct close with a pyrotechnical display of rhetorical prestidigitation, he did what seminar speakers do....(sometimes)...he unrolled his impossibly long sticky tongue and with a deft flick, snapped up the miscreant buzzer and gobbled him down noisily in the time it takes to say the words 'magical realism'. Poor Jeff.

The thesis was a scintillating success, the halls of academe rang loud with blistering applause and Tony looked round, blinking, replete, smiling expansively with those fleshy lips, dabbing daintily at the corners of his mouth with a large monogrammed cream linen handkerchief, probably from some street-trader in Saville Row. Beware the ginger, when the moon is fat...