A Beautiful Mind

Some years back an old fellow sat down in a decrepit little room and started to write. Inspired by Paulo Coelho’s latest bestseller (A Stranger, A Mountain and A Small Peanut) Our Hero (who, for the purposes of narrative, may be christened Mr. Tolstoy [Ed: at this point it is useful to interject to impress upon our dear reader that the choice of a nom de plume for our hero does in no way indicate his origin or ethnicity. Please do not for an instant assume that our hero is a COSSACK. Also, any visual/ phonetic/ other similarity between authors mentioned thus far and others who peddle sub-pulp literature in real life is purely coincidental.]) was convinced that literature was a sure means to making a quick buck.

A Quick Buck.

Mr. Tolstoy was so pleased with the rich sound of the phrase that he had pasted small inscribed posters all over his dec. little room. An attempt to have the words tattooed on his forehead had been prematurely thwarted by the tattooist fainting at the sight of Mr. Tolstoy’s face.

A sad fact: Mr. Tolstoy had been born shatteringly hideous. A mysterious disappearance of his parents and his extended family at the age of two [when Mr. Tolstoy was two, not the family] had baffled the press for years and had left Mr. Tolstoy in an orphanage which burnt down shortly afterwards. A series of minor disasters that followed Mr. Tolstoy’s movements for the next few years had the church convinced that he, indeed, was the anti-Christ; a notion that was very quickly reversed when the Pope publicly declared after a personal meeting with Mr. Tolstoy that even the son of Satan would have had more panache to start with.

But we digress. After years of being displaced from one hovel to the next, Mr. Tolstoy had succeeded in finding a nice little hole owned by a (clinically blind) war veteran, and it is here that Mr. Tolstoy had started penning his masterpiece.

Suddenly the ceiling fell on him and he died.


- The End -