Oct 18, 2015

Extract from Chapter 11 of mystery-comedy novel, 'The Investigations of the Para-Usual':

Near to hand, set up on the pavement outside a newsagents was a vendor of fruit and vegetables, his wares arranged upon tables in plastic bowls.

‘The Brussels sprout? What do we know about the… Yes, why, we know that the Brussels sprout has to be the most locally grown vegetable known to man,’ said O’Singh, picking up a shining example from one of the vendor’s bowls. ‘A vegetable originating from one particular Belgian city.’

‘Or is it?’ Dr Pratt countered, springing with muted gusto across to another display. ‘Consider the Savoy cabbage!’ he said, holding aloft one of the very same, again tilting his head to take the strain off his neck.

‘Well I never! Are you saying?’

‘The Savoy cabbage is a cabbage that hails not from a country, not from a city even, but a hotel, a single London edifice.’

The academics stood facing each other, momentarily, in mutual admiration, Dr Pratt looking very much like a pet dog that cocks its head in recognition of something it cannot fathom but with which it is familiar all the same.

That was quite possibly the moment, O’Singh would later proclaim, that the men sealed their partnership. O’Singh as Dr Pratt’s accomplice at the IPU. The very idea. The potential. The potential for mass discovery. The possibilities. At last, at this point, we might dare to dream of learning everything – the art of mind-reading, or why a bull’s eye is in the centre of a dartboard but not located in the middle of that animal’s body.