Thursday, November the 11th, 2004

back to: title, date or indexes

hear this 

Blotzmann's Syndrome

Recently we referred to an outbreak of cases of Blotzmann's Syndrome, and certain medically-minded readers have written in to seek further information about this modern scourge. (It is a modern scourge, as opposed to a perennial scourge, because the first recorded case is from a few months ago, according to the medical journals to which I subscribe, albeit that in a paper presented to the first conference devoted to Blotzmann's Syndrome—in Helsinki, in September—one Doctor Javier Illegible of Samarkand referred to a pandemic in the Land of Geese during the fifteenth century which may well have been an earlier instance of the condition, although we cannot be sure, and Doctor Illegible's documentation has been questioned by both eminent physicians and by a few cantankerous autodidacts, chief among the latter the infamous nincompoop Father Ignacio Tweakling, priest, potter, topiarist and champion of Fletcherism, the once-popular dietary technique involving much chewing, “much chewing” not to be confused with the village of that name where Father Tweakling, by uncanny coincidence, lived, and this parenthetical sentence has gone on for far too long, so it must end now, or soon, though the sooner the better for all our sakes. There.)

Blotzmann's Syndrome is named after the man who first isolated it in laboratory conditions, whose name was Blotzmann. He had never met Father Tweakling, although he had encountered the priest's sister on some kind of management training paintball exercise in woodland, to which he went on sufferance, after threats from his superior, a man whose psychometric tests showed him to be—and I quote from the hitherto confidential report—“flabby, petulant, and fixated upon cashew nuts”.

Blotzmann pelted Father Tweakling's sister with twigs and berries, for he refused to carry a paintball gun. At sunset, he sat down and swept his hands across the forest floor.

The generic term for all that stuff found on the ground in forests and woodland is “duff”.

Something Blotzmann's fingers brushed lightly against gave him a piercing insight into the syndrome which now bears his name. He dashed back to the lab, did a few experiments with a bunsen burner and some substances mentioned in the Old Testament, and wrote up his findings in a frenzy, pressing the blotting paper to his scrawl as dawn broke. Lighting a cheroot, he stepped outside, and encountered a dairy person on her way to milk cows.

“I have just isolated the agency whereby folk fall victim to a malady the nature of which has been befogged and blurry e'en to the best minds in the field of medicine,” said Blotzmann to the rosy-cheeked maiden, at five o clock in the morning. Unfortunately, her brain was so thoroughly consumed by an as-yet-unsolved cryptic crossword clue that she ignored him, and thus a love that could have conquered everything, a love of intense passion that would have been writ down the ages like that of Abelard and Heloise or of Tristan and Iseult was doomed never to spark.

Blotzmann named his syndrome. The dairymaid milked her cows. But the two were destined never to meet again, on this planet or in any other existence that might await them, two lonely stars in a boundless and incomprehensible firmament.