Saturday, February the 28th, 2004

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Istvan & Zoltan

“Crikey!” exclaimed Istvan, “What in the name of heaven is that?”

His twin brother Zoltan looked up from the book he was reading. “Istvan, calm down,” he drawled, “You know I hate to be interrupted in my reading, especially when the book in my hands is the Journals of Gerard Manley Hopkins & I have just got to the entry for that most exciting day, 27th April 1871, when the poet, quote, mesmerised a duck with chalk lines drawn from her beak sometimes level & sometimes forwards on a black table, unquote.”

“How on earth can you immerse yourself in the prose of a Victorian Jesuit,” screeched Istvan, “When I am about to be waylaid by a preposterously complicated mechanical contraption somehow imbued with almost human malevolence?”

Zoltan yawned. “I have long been fascinated by Hopkins,” he averred, “Incidentally, were you aware, o twin, that the nuns whose drowning was commemorated in that majestic poem The Wreck of the Deutschland lie buried in Saint Patrick's Roman Catholic Cemetery in Leytonstone, east London, & that I have placed flowers on the grave? Peonies, I recall, or mayhap they were pinks, or pansies.”

“Eek!” yelled Istvan. Zoltan cast his eyes in the direction indicated by the frantic gesticulations his twin brother made to complement his frightful ‘eek’.

“Golly!” gasped Zoltan, his eyes popping. For trundling at inhuman speed towards Istvan was a monstrous steam-powered engine, bulky & strange, built of tungsten, titanium & tin, & seemingly alive with a perplexing array of hooters, levers, flaps, nozzles, chains, bleepers, consoles, klaxons, chocks, struts, decoy shields, Coddington lenses, batteries, prongs, bits of corrugated cardboard & Mackenzie beams. It was the Indigestion Machine!