draliman on life

Here is my contribution to Laura’s Literary Lion challenge, which has a 400 word maximum. This week the Literary Lion has supplied the prompt word “time”.

I had lots of ideas for this week and finally went for the maddest one :-).

Flowering thyme – image from Wikimedia Commons, attributed to user “Greenmars”

“Thyme. A king among herbs.”

This was the opening line of the presentation given at the Twelfth Annual Conference of Advanced Physics, Manchester by Professor Grint Bigglesworth.

Bigglesworth, a man so convinced of his own infallibility that “mistakes” were something which happened to other people. A man who, in his youth, had developed a theory which had made him impossible to ignore, much as everyone wanted to.

An appreciative laugh rippled through the audience. Biggleworth was slightly confused – he’d decided not to start with the standard opening joke – but carried on unperturbed.

“Used by the ancient Egyptians for embalming and by the Greeks as incense, today we use it…” he continued.

Had he taken a moment to think, he might have wondered why his allotted topic at a conference of advanced physics was a discourse on a small green plant. Had he looked at the faces of his audience (all inferior to him, as he believed), he might have noticed the grins of embarrassment. the nervous fidgeting. Had he insisted on a written copy of his invitation to speak, he might have noticed the spelling of the word “time”.

However, he did none of these things. And thus he continued extolling the virtues of thymus vulgaris for a full hour and thirty minutes.

He was instantly ruined. No-one would return his calls. No journal would accept his submissions. His university finally had an excuse to be rid of him.

And so on that day, a self-important blowhard was forever removed from the invitation list of every major scientific conference in the world. On that day, a self-righteous narcissist with all the social graces of a cucumber was denied access to all public forums. On that day, an annoyingly persistent serial letter-writer was permanently barred from publication in any respectable (and many less respectable) scientific publications, magazines and newspapers.

Was it an honest mistake, an insidious conspiracy or rampant stupidity that brought him to this? Do we care? Let us just sit, close our eyes, take a cup of tea and a chocolate biscuit perhaps, and be thankful.