The Legend of le Tuff: (6) Supple -- and subtle

One can only suppose that years of championship fencing must have honed le Tuff's reflexes to the sharpness of one of the many broken Gillette safety razors scattered on his desk, for it was only a matter of a quarter of an hour or so of Crippens's incessant friendly blows before mein host leapt to his feet and greeted me as warmly as if he had known me for years and was fully conscious.

"Wilson! Do come in!" he ejaculated.

"I am in already, le Tuff," I replied. Oh, the wit of the man!

"So you are, so you are. That will be all, Crimble."

Le Tuff's loyal manservant and occupational therapist shuffled to the door, turned, bowed, smiled, scraped something off the sole of his shoe and left the chamber.

"So, what brings you here, old man?" the famous navigator and entomologist inquired.

"Your invitation was intriguing, Baz -- if I may call you Baz."

"Yes ... and no," was his enigmatic reply.

Le Tuff "wrote the book" on personal hygeine, and as he flossed his teeth I became aware of a genuine French bidet in the corner of the room, but I gave no compliment at this moment for I saw that he was about to speak. His great mouth opened wide, he drew breath, and that aquiline eye shot through the window of my soul like an arrow.

With one eyebrow cocked, his gaze transfixed me for a full minute, as he slowly and almost gracefully pirouetted, like a huge cog in an ancient grain mill, still staring like a cobra at my receptive eye. His body, so supple from a lifetime of extreme calisthenics, twisted, and lowered itself such that within a fascinating moment his face showed through the space between his svelte legs, near his crutch. An amicable and intellectual-looking grin spread from cheek to cheek, and he disarmingly spoke to me -- just seven eloquent, mysterious words that burned into my soul and will remain with me till the end of my days:

"What about that Son of Sam, huh?"

The Legend of le Tuff: (5) O Scrotsmuir

Like so many, I left my heart in that wonderful mansion by the sea.

Parking my car outside the high lilac walls of the property on that sunny day, I pushed heavily on the grand gates, and suffered a mild hernia. Only later did I discover that those remarkable iron contrivances were so designed as to pump water, with every visitor's entry, from a neighbour's swimming pool to a cosy little lake in the Scrotsmuir grounds. "Saves a fortune in water rates and chlorine," he told me years later. Le Tuff is nothing if not inventive.

My footfall was crunchy up the gravel drive that wound lazily around the hillside like a white serpent. With considerable exertion I climbed the wide front steps, caught my breath, stepped to the immense, Byzantine Hardiplank doors and rapped loudly on the great bronze knockers.

Le Tuff's faithful manservant and amanuensis was at the door within tens of minutes. "Oh do come in," he said musically, "Master has been expecting you." It was to the tune of Favourite Things, I think, but that is neither here nor there.

As I followed the humming Crippen through the labyrinthine corridors and halls, my neck also became herniated as I stared around me at an opulence like unto nothing I had seen since my days in ... well, where those days were spent is of no importance compared to the opulence of Scrotsmuir.

When I was finally shown into the library of the great man, I found him comfortably prostrate on a Queen Anne chaise longue of noteworthy design (it being some three times the length of my new friend).

"Good morning, le Tuff," I ventured. But nothing was replied. As I inched forward through the fashionable darkness, I noted that his charming tricoloured eyes were closed. Crippen saw my nervousness, and came to my aid.

"Master is suffering a slight bazzitude today, sir," he said, gentle as the morn.

A terrifyingly loud thunderclap rent the sky outside. "Bazzitude?" I asked, endeavouring not to appear ignorant.

"Yes, sir. Bazzitude. It has been in the last two Greater Oxford Dictionaries, ever since Master's novella memoire, 'Sack and Burn the Back Streets of Detroit'. Have you not heard the word?"

I shamefully confessed that I had not, though of course I knew the masterpiece intimately.

Crippen sensitively crooned Ted Nugent's Dog, Dog, Dog Eat Dog as with telling compassion he slapped le Tuff across the face with a short piece of 4 X 2 pine.

"Wakie, wakie, hands off snakey, sir. You have a visitor." ...

To be continued

(Part of today's episode was suggested by a reader, Sylvia from London. You suggest it, I'll try to write it.)

The Legend of le Tuff: (4) The enigmatic epigrammist

I really must tell of my first visit to Scrotsmuir, as I promised, but first an aside about one particularly touching side of the much-copied but never-equalled le Tuff personality.

The Holy Bible, Shakespeare, Emerson, Franklin, Wilde: their famous apothegms so fill the quotidian language of learned and unschooled alike that we scarce know who first penned them. The oft-quoted truism "An intangible yesterday is the compliment you pay to the fool and the rebuke to the wise man" is such an one of these. Most think it is from Scripture. Not so; it is a le Tuffism.

"A forgotten inkstand in the nose: no disgrace."
"Mercies are to the fisherman what spite is to the standing."
"People who dine by partridges need no alms makers."
"There is many a slip betwixt Fleet Street and the blood of the chimneysweep."
"Yeah, stick another two fingers in. No you fool, I meant the bourbon."

Each and every scintillating adage by Baz le Tuff!

You doubt me? Oh, but see She who was nigh Singapore, now is comelier: Gentle thoughts and crude for the yearning youngster (le Tuff, Baz, OULP, 1987, 684 pp). Be amazed, and be illuminated by these familiar epigrams that improve the mind and character, as you discover that all these commonplace maxims come from the one outstanding intellect.

I leave you with just a few more randomly chosen examples of over 4,700 proverbs from the teeming brain of the greatest epigrammist of the 20th and 21st centuries:

"Forget thou that ye hast sniffed until the morning night."
"None knows the hour of the spite of doo-wah-diddy."
"A full bottle of Scotch; half a bottle of scotch; blahdy blahdy."
"Look before you buy; try before you leap; inkstands."
"As you make your partridge, so you must spite your hahaha nose."
"Do as I say, not as the partridge must spite your too fucking much nose."
"None knows the hour the partridge wearily spites the nose of the bloody chimneysweep."
"Whack it up your sleeve. I'll hold the belt."
"Desperate diseases call for desperate inkstands."
"Stupid publishers: stupider people. Set them on fire I say."
"Something about inkstands. Chuck anything in here. Bloody belch."
"Don't count your chickens to spite your whatever partridge-stand."
"A great big, big, big, big bosom. Try it with ice. Nup better straight. Partridges yeah yeah."
"Dah de blah de dum partridges Johnny Walker something something."

Baz le Tuff, thank you, sir!

(Excepts from She who was nigh Singapore, now is comelier: Gentle thoughts and crude for the yearning youngster (le Tuff, Baz, OULP, 1987, 684 pp) reproduced with kind permission of Oxford University Little Press.)

To be continued ...

The Legend of le Tuff: (3) Strength in the bottom of adversity

Young folk these days are sometimes surprised to learn that there were not always le Tuff enterprises in the world.

Indeed, even for the mature, it is difficult to imagine a world without the le Tuff rectangular piston, BazleTuff Disco Drops, TuffGuevaraMedia and of course the invention that started it all, Tuff Wipes, to name but a few runaway mercantile successes.

The Tuff Wipe that you, along with more than four billion other grateful consumers, use each day was not always large and green, and indeed, not popular in the competitive world of personal hygeine products. In point of actual fact, le Tuff's 1972 prototype resembled more a craggy yellow spud-gun than the familiar jumbo-sized sanitary aid in today's 'little room'.

The initial product trials were disappointing -- "Damn hopeless," le Tuff himself admits today, but this is where character and the famous never-say-die le Tuffian attitude came to the fore. After several months of experimentation requiring great personal expense, and the tragic sacrifice of several dedicated laboratory assistants, the current model was given the famous le Tuff 'thumbs up' and -- well, of course the rest is history ...

To be continued

The Legend of le Tuff: (2) His origins, his transportation and an observation on Scrotsmuir

Le Tuff is nothing if not modest, and very few people outside the criminal justice system really have much idea of his many achievements, nor of the events of his life.

The time and place of his birth are not known, to this writer at least, and it is indeed hard to imagine le Tuff as young, but it is said there are in the British Museum some sketchy records of a childhood spent in South Wales, Patagonia, Beijing, Alburquerque, Wagga Wagga, Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, Ouagadougou, Kabul, Monaco, Tierra del Fuego, Melbourne, Kilkenny, Madagascar, Honshu, Swaziland, New Jersey, Wormwood Scrubs, The Hague, Auckland, Castro Street (San Francisco), Easter Island, Kuala Lumpur, Madras, St Petersburg, Glasgow, Ulan Baator and the Mississippi delta where he picked up a slight American "twang" and a Louisiana record-breaking number of STDs.

A brilliant 43-Man Squamish quarterback in high school, he won an Offshore Rhodes Scholarship and read Natural History at St Helena, taking the university medal in his first year.

When le Tuff turned his mind to the engineering sciences his aptitude was clear to all, and it is said that his substantial fortune today rests in large part on his Thuringian Amplitude Device which revolutionised the sub-Saharan food industry as well as enabling the drainage of marshlands in Iraq. He has told your writer on numerous occasions that the social good that has come from the T. A. D. was well worth the loss of two daughters and three fingers of his left hand.

How he came to reside in Australia is as hidden as the facts of his youth, but Poxlough says le Tuff's intriguing secret is shared by some of the best-known names at Scotland Yard. Be that exciting notion as it may, he has made this country his own and we have accepted him as one of our sons, much as Britain has taken Rolf Harris to her ample bosom. His first antipodean years, spent at some place in Victoria called Pentridge, unknown to your writer, were apparently uneventful, and the later alleged sale of a shipment of date-expired canned food and medicines to a network of Queensland orphanages, mere scuttlebutt and hearsay. Of this I speak on the authority of none less than the great man himself.

His towering mock-Federation home on an ocean cliff just outside the pleasant vale of Toormina-on-Tasman is as eye-piercingly beautiful as it is comfortable, for le Tuff if not for his many less-sophisticated guests (he is democratic above all). Miss Emberley avows that it is the grandeur of the magnificent granite colossus of Sir Robert Menzies, nude and astride the white gravel drive, that accounts for the swooning of many young local girls. Le Tuff self-effacingly shrugs off their disappearance and will take none of the credit. "Nothing to do with me at all, old bean," he once said to me as he quaffed his morning tot of methylated spirits. "They see the faux topiary, and I suppose they are inspired to travel le Grand Tour of the Continent before age and infirmity take their toll." Ever humble, ever kindly, eh, le Tuff?!

Oh, well do I remember my first visit to Scrotsmuir and the very quaint (and amusing) recently deceased 'envelope' in which the purple-edged invitation was delivered ...

To be continued

The Legend of le Tuff: (1) The Meeting

This month it is forty years since I met le Tuff. Forty long, long years. Thus it is that, to commemorate this important anniversary, over the next few days I shall recount some memories of just a few remarkable events in what scholars now call the notorious "le Tuff legend", to which I have been a grateful and unworthy spectator.

In 1965, most people I knew had one thing on their minds. Actually, two if you count trying to grow hair over the forehead. Little did I know, dear reader, that there was another, far greater than these, whose aspirations were formidably more advanced.

Baz le Tuff was already well established as a freelance acrobatic neuro-surgeon when I met him on that propitious grey day in the Oodnadatta Club. He had apparently just settled into his customary armchair with a raspberry gin following (as I only learned months later in the journal Nature) a successful afternoon discovering how to save fish from drowning. As you will know, the le Tuff Method is used now in countries all around the world and many a halibut is thankful. What you probably do not know is that he never accepted a penny for it. (He told me in 1994 when he declined the Nobel for this addition to human knowledge, as he so often has since the third prize, "It's what any man would have done, Wilson". No, le Tuff, not any man!)

His dresser had apparently eloped that morning with a Hutu prostituée and le Tuff was dishevelled, of course, but not in a crassly fashionable way. Rather, he had the air of a man long accustomed to the tousled vestments that are the lot of most, nay all, men of genius. He puffed on a Messerschmidt pipe and casually -- vacantly, one might say -- leafed through the Russian edition of a Dumas Classics Illustrated. It was some months before I knew that his reading of the magazine upside down, and in a language utterly unknown to him, was le Tuff's very own practised way of increasing the challenge of any literary masterpiece not his own. It is a method I have since emulated, recommended to many, but to this day not mastered.

It was Walsingham, I think, or Geoffrey St John who introduced me to the man. As he looked up from his comic Count of Monte Cristo I could not help but notice a fetching smile that transfigured his berry-stained, crooked lips and pink teeth into an even more wonderful feature (this was long before the craze for teeth of that colour), and Cyril Poxlough nudged me so that I might marvel with him at the slight residue of dried crimson saliva that still seemed to trickle elegantly from le Tuff's mouth to his asymmetric chin. Naturellement, I was won over immediately!

He fixed me with that intense, blue-veined eye which is well known to all who have seen him in the colour films, and who in the Western world has not? I thought he was about to deign to speak to me, and my companions tell me they were sure he would, but instead he pressed his charmingly pointed right elbow into the arm of the big leather chair, tilting his dandyish, statuesque physique in a manner that Poxlough and Miss Emberley later agreed was "smoulderingly erotic", drew back his paisley polyester smoking jacket and deftly took from his back pocket an immense jar of home-pickled Kandahari walnuts.

"Nuts?" he asked me with a cordiality that was completely disarming.

Of course, I knew instantly we would be firm friends ...

More tomorrow, deo volente.