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.