Thursday, July the 20th, 2006
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A package arrives from Dr Ruth Pastry. It contains a wodge of cosmetic samples accompanied by the following letter:
Ahoy there, Key! I read with interest the piece about your shrivelled docent (see below, 18 July) and I think you are barking up a gum tree, or whatever that saying is, with your conjectures about what happened to him. Forget Honved, or bees, or the grassy knoll. The clue is in that contraption he used instead of spectacles, in particular that it made use of “light-reflecting” mirrors and lenses. Something about that phrase set me thinking, so I went to have a lie down on my day-bed on my veranda in the baking heat, shaded by many parasols brought back from far Cathay. From time to time I took dainty sips from a tumbler of iced nettle and hawthorn cordial, while my cat, Boutros Boutros-Ghali IV, frisked among the hollyhocks with a ball of wool and a small, lost toad which had wandered far from its pond.
I kept mulling over the words “light-reflecting” until I had a eureka moment. Of course! “Light-reflecting booster technology”, the crucial ingredient of one of L'Oreal's much-advertised shampoo preparations! No one knows what this actually means, least of all the craven expense-account-addled plop-heads at the advertising company, but I have always been an aficionado of booster technology in all its forms, whether light-reflecting or not.
Now, my question is, did your docent ever show any interest in extreme right wing politics? The founders of L'Oreal were known for their Nazi sympathies, and in fact used a confiscated Jewish property as their HQ in the Vichy years. Could your docent have thrown in his lot with the nascent cosmetics giant and been the onlie begetter of light-reflecting booster technology? I think we should be told.
Yours running on all systems go, Ruth Pastry.
PS : If you would like me to write a series of pieces about enthralling booster technologies for Hooting Yard, just say the word.