Improv part the first

At last: improv 1! My usual cheerful stuff.


The interesting and, it has in retrospect to be admitted, the problematic thing about him was his hat. It was too interesting. Its wobbly edifice appeared to have been assembled from pieces of what was fashionable at 20-year intervals over the last 200 years, plus a couple of military uniforms and tribal headdresses, all held together by string, spit, and baseless hope. People were too busy marvelling at it to notice anything else about the man.

It is true, of course, that most of us take great care not to notice or remember much about beggars and vagrants; but when prompted (by a serious-looking police sergeant, say) we can, some better than others, recall a few details like fragments of a fading, unpleasant dream. Height; the colour of eyes, hair, and teeth; the amount of these things: this much can generally be worked out.

But as for the man in the hat, well, after cross-examining all known witnesses and holding a conference of detectives, the police concluded that 1) he wasn't too tall, since the hat was always at eye-level and 2) he was probably a man. If not, she was a pretty manly sort of woman. Anyway, he definitely had a hat. But were he to take it off - well, he could be anyone making a racket at a street-corner.

Feeling that 'short stature, likely male, may be wearing unusual hat' didn't quite cut it, Sergeant Silkie added 'or concealing same about person' to the official description. But then, he was apparently concealing a casket's worth of jewels, a Rembrandt, and a missing person about his person - all of which ought perhaps to have been more immediately visible than the hat, magnificently visible as it was.

The description was duly transmitted through all channels, across the country and to all foreign police forces, even the ones we don't particularly like. Frankly it was unnecessary to make such a fuss. Their man (he was a man) was in the city, to be sure. He was dining out, actually. Funny place, the universe: it was precisely as Sergeant Silkie added the bit about the hat that he removed it.

He drew a can of Diet Irn Bru from a cavernous pocket and filled his wine-glass.

'Five-thousand pound,' he said levelly to the person opposite him. This was pushing it, since they were already paying for the meal. But he'd made a career of pushing it - as so many admirable, respectable, important or at the last resort at least memorable people do.