Newcastle Brown and Nottingham Lace

Tomorrow I shall take my honest cart and trundle up to Newcastle to deliver myself of certain relatively judicious opinions upon the works of postgraduates in that city which has at times been taken to be Peru. I look forward to a change of horse at Ely, at Peterborough, and possibly at Grantham, the city of Our Blessed Lady Margaret of the Greengrocers, proceeding northwards from thence via the Roman encampment of Doncaster and the resolute towers of Durham before plunging into the Tyne, or rather across it. It will be like bringing the good news from Ghent to Aix.

The following day I shall ride equally hard to Nottingham for to purchase some lace and while there to converse amiably with a student thereof who will delight me with his notions of Queer literature with many a verse accompanying, for I am a man of parts; and did I not spend an hour and above this morning with a maid of Romanie talking of Tristan Tzara and Eugene Ionesco and all things Absurd of whom and which my knowledge is as that of a flea, which never did prevent me building my small flea-palaces of thought and conjecture (more conjecture than thought some of the wiser sort may remark) which, looked at in a certain light, are sometimes supposed to be of greater dimensions than they are.

And next Wednesday I shall mount my wife's good broom and fly me (and us both) to Munich to deliver myself of yet more palaces of verse, in the quiet hours composing as subtil and learned article upon the works of a foreign bard as this flea-palace will allow.

But that is not before organising and presenting one reading featuring, among other luminaries, Count Thwaite of Ashwellthorpe, at the university of the Northfolk on Monday, and being part of another with the Grand Prince of China, Professor Yang Lian, at same on Tuesday, thus completing my stint as Solomon Grundy.

Is October the cruellest month, or November? Discuss.

Exercises en style no 738