Monday, March the 27th, 2006

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Pindar Widgery, the Pint-sized Provocateur

First instance. You are walking along a country lane as dusk descends. The path is muddy, but you are wearing a pair of stout Canadian Forestry Service boots. Crows caw from the trees, and from the direction of the lake you hear the demented cry of loons. Jauntily, you swing your stick through the air and whistle a half-remembered tune from the golden age of the hoochie-coochie dance band era. All of a sudden, your path is blocked by a diminutive figure. He is wearing a thrum nightcap and an ill-fitting suit of clothes. He has a goatee beard, a pasty complexion, and while one of his eyes is mischievously a-twinkle, the other seems dead, as if it were made of glass. He is carrying a little drum, and as he stands in front of you, he begins to pound it with his strangely muscular fist, arhythmically, even peskily. You step to one side, to stride past him, but he dodges in front of you. You step to the other side, but he springs sideways to forestall you, all the while banging his drum. Your temper rises. Brandishing your stick, you are about to belabour him about the head, but he anticipates your move, emits a sinister gurgling noise, and flits off into the trees as suddenly as he appeared. You walk on, no longer jaunty, but fractious and grim.

Second instance. The arena is packed, and you stand at your lectern, looking out at the thousands of devotees who have gathered to hear your lecture. You enjoy nothing more than demolishing David Icke's theory of intergalactic lizard people, and the talk you have prepared for tonight is perhaps your most cogent one to date. You clear your throat, and the huge crowd rustles into silence. All of a sudden, a diminutive figure crashes on to the stage at your side. He is wearing a thrum nightcap and an ill-fitting suit of clothes. He has a goatee beard, a pasty complexion, and while one of his eyes is mischievously a-twinkle, the other seems dead, as if it were made of glass. He snatches your lecture notes from the lectern, rips them into a thousand pieces, and casts them on the floor at your feet. Momentarily discombobulated, you become apoplectic with rage, and lurch towards the tiny man, intending to wring his neck. But before you can reach him, he flits away, and is instantly lost in the crowd. You had felt in such high spirits, and now you are fractious and grim.

These two instances are fictional, of course, for you, the reader, have never been provoked in such a brazen manner by so diminutive a fellow in a thrum nightcap. My purpose in inventing these scenes was to give you an idea of what it was like to be accosted by Pindar Widgery, the pint-sized provocateur. Countless are those who have been so accosted. Each tells a similar story, that their mood was good, they were jaunty, in high spirits, when this tiny, goateed man in an ill-fitting suit, with that incongruous thrum nightcap atop his tiny head, appeared out of nowhere and provoked them to violence, violence he escaped by vanishing into a forest, or into a crowd, or even, according to some accounts, just going pfffft! in a puff of inexplicable vapour.

Inexplicable indeed is the vapour into which he has now disappeared, for the last time. I am here to write his obituary. I know that, by convention, I ought to have begun by writing “Pindar Widgery, who has died aged ninety-two in a bobsleigh accident, was known as the pint-sized provocateur”. That would have been the correct way to begin, but I wanted to break the news gently. And, in truth, I wanted to fill my allotted space with something, and, good grief, we know so little about Pindar Widgery's life. Ancestry—unknown. Year of birth—unknown. Childhood—a mystery, save for an unreliable anecdote buried in a footnote in a biography of silver screen siren Edna Purviance. Formative influences—unknown. And so it goes on. We do not know when he decided to devote his life to pointless provocations, nor why. We can only guess that a smile crossed his lips when he was described in print as “the most exasperating man on the planet”. We do not even know if that dead eye was made of glass. Perhaps all we can be sure of was that his presence, at such an advanced age, on a fully-crewed bobsleigh careering at terrifying speed in the snow-capped mountains of a cold and distant winter sports resort, must have been yet another provocative act.

Oh, one other thing we know. Many witnesses have placed him indisputably on the sixth floor of the Texas Schoolbook Depository on Dealey Plaza in Dallas at noon on the 22nd of November 1962. I know this was exactly a year before the assassination of John F Kennedy, but still…

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