Pinch and a Punch

How very interesting: I'm researching Lear-iana for the coming exhibition, 25 May - 31 August [and if any clever clogs knows, do let tell me what the correct word is for stuff pertaining to Lear], and lo, a book cover closely resembling the Punch volume from the San Luca study book-case that I hurled into the void from the side drive of Villa Thefti.

I sort of bent the truth when i said I was completely caught off guard by the April 2007 double filch of my personal jewelry.

I was walking past maman's room and there she was with my brother handing over to him the San Luca edition of punchiana.

Normally I'd not have thought anything of it - completely up to Mum to give away the family library in whichever direction she chooses - but there was something furtive about the glance she gave the open door, and of course we now know what it was: my jewels were next to be 'fenced'.

Then I did finally see my box on my bro's dressing table. I marched up to where both thefteurs sat, and bearded, branded and red-handed them.

After which followed the usual choleric gyaku gire that always spews from the guilty. (Such a good word, almost worth having been stolen from to have discovered its existence.) Like obganiate that someone passed to me just the other day in token of my 68 months' endurance of repetition ad murderous nauseam: 'to be tediously repetitious'. Wish I'd come across it while maman was still alive and obganiating on all eight cylinders, God help me.

Anyway, back to the thievery: marched I down to the living room where mr Punch lay under the cawfee table mags, scooped it up and took a quick snap for the record. Then, in a single flowing cam shot (as cinephiles have it), marched through the hall, out across the drive, over to the far side where I hurled the weighty volume into a convenient chasm.

Wonderful satisfying spin it made - great aero-dynamics on those original leather-bounders (I was joking about Skivertex).

LEST WE FORGET

We're coming up to another April 8 (Sunday, by Jove, the other lot's Easter) and I shall be continuing the tradition I started with maman of buying a lunch-time half bouteille of bubbly and toasting absent bling and keeping alive the memory of the Big Filch.

Six people stolen from:

Me of my most precious possessions, the only objects in the whole property of any sentimental or emtional value and importance.

Stephanie, my ex

My two girls

Their two fellahs, as yet unmet so they're in for a nice surprise.

This year there's only me to drink it (not that mum always partook: as I recall, 2009 fermented with particularly boisterous gyaku g-ire.)

Anyway, there's an artists impression of the jewel box on the precise spot in my bedside cupboard from which it was lifted in the early hours of April.