In the meantime all sorts of ideas occurred - could this be the French white knight who would offer to sell advertising for the next magazine? Was it the editor of the Journal of the Luberon and Les Alpilles coming to issue a coded threat to get off his patch? A takeover offer from the Riviera Reporter? The pastis fuelled imagination sometimes knows no bounds.
When we returned from England there was a strange message on our answering machine. A gruff French voice announced that he’d picked up our magazine and had an idea that might be interesting for us. We arranged to meet.
At the appointed hour a battered Citreon trundled up the dirt track and a man with a bushy moustache to make Magnum proud, stepped out. He clutched his battered brief case to his chest as if it carried industrial secrets, declined the offer of a drink and began his pitch. Papers laden with number combinations were quickly strewn across my desk. What could he want? I’d never seen cash flow projections done in such a haphazard manner. “Now we begin here,” said the mysterious Frenchman, sharpening a pencil and chewing the end, “ah yes, you see that must be a six, because the arrow indicates there are three in that direction.” “You have a go…” he continued handing me a pencil. I looked pleadingly at Tanya, who giggled from the kitchen and continued to feed our daughter. I’d apparently invited the inventor of French Sudoku into our house and he wasn’t going to stop until I completed all five levels of his puzzles. The beers mounted on the table, and as I finished the final board, I said I would think about putting his work in the magazine. The moustache moved upwards with joy. Rather than bring a (much needed) end to the meeting our guest raced back to the car, returning with a black sack full of other games he’d invented - a poker rubic cube, the ubiquitous wooden block puzzle, the man was like a magician pulling endless objects from a seemingly empty bag. Meanwhile outside dusk was falling, and in the oven our supper was burning. We were only saved by the fact that 2 hours without a cigarette was more than our mad inventor friend could stand. His craving got the better of him and he disappeared down the drive trailing smoke.
Comments