Monday, January the 23rd, 2006

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Surgeon's Biscuit

Some people think Surgeon's Biscuit is the name of a town near Kakadamm. Others believe it is an old parlour game popular in the boarding houses of seaside resorts during the 1930s. There are those who suspect it to be the name of a racehorse, or perhaps a racing pigeon, or some other bird or beast of swiftness. Surgeon's Biscuit is, of course, none of these things. It is simply a biscuit that belonged to a surgeon.

But what a biscuit! And what a surgeon! As biscuits go, it was the finest specimen the surgeon had ever seen. Two thirds of the way down a perfectly ordinary-looking packet of digestive crumblies, there it nestled, a numinous, almost golden thing, some quirk in its baking making it unutterably different from its fellows in the batch. He remembered when he first handled it. He was not a man to transfer his newly-purchased biscuits into a so-called “biscuit tin” or similar container. He ate them straight from the packet, as he had been brought up to do by his rough, tough parents in their rough, tough hovel, who can never have expected little Vladimir to grow up to become an important surgeon. So on that day, during the last pathetic gasps of the Nixon administration, he took the next biscuit from the pack without even looking at it. Sitting at his large important desk in his spacious important consulting rooms, his attention was fixed on page forty six, column two, line fifteen of The Haemoglobin Monitor, where his name appeared, misspelled yet again! Why was it, he wondered, slowly moving the fabulous biscuit from the opened packet towards his mouth, that despite being the country's most famous surgeon, despite being referred to in virtually every haemoglobin-related article of note for the past three decades, not a single medical journal ever managed to spell his name correctly? He was about to bite his biscuit when something stopped him. A black beetle crawled across the magazine page, and came to a dead halt on his name. Vladimir shuddered, as if this were some presentiment of doom (which it was) and ditched his biscuit-eating plan. And it was then that he looked at the biscuit for the first time. He had been holding it for perhaps eight or nine seconds without paying it the least attention. Now, as the black beetle sat still on his misspelled name, dying of a rare black beetle disease, he not only saw the biscuit but felt it. Indeed, all his senses apprehended this majestic biscuit. And a spark lit up in his brain, just as the last spark in the black beetle's brain was extinguished, and he said to himself, “I am a great surgeon, and this is a great biscuit! Rather than bite into it and chew it and digest this digestive crumbly, I am going to put it in a box and preserve it, and it will forever after be known as the Surgeon's Biscuit!”

Some say the soul of the black beetle escaped its dead shell and imbued the biscuit at that very instant. But black beetles do not have souls, and the biscuit was just a biscuit, and Vladimir himself was only an average surgeon, albeit a surgeon of enormous learning in the field of haemoglobin, but a surgeon with a deluded and preposterous sense of self-importance.

And that is the real story of Surgeon's Biscuit.