I fear that this may be another indication that my job is failing to fulfil me. It may also be an indication that I am failing to fulfil my job.

Tuesday March 27th

Beer Mat’s Last Theorem

On the back of a beer mat,

he finally proved the theorem

that

It is fair to say that, until this evening, the musical genre of Math Punk had passed me by. The gates to those halcyon days of blissful ignorance have now sadly closed to me. The eight-piece Fibonazi Sequence played a set of snarling anarcho-algorhythmic rock as they promoted their latest album The Lowest Common Denominator.

They opened with their new single, ‘My Sex is Hard (like a Diophantine Equation)’. Darren declared that he could actually hear integer coefficients within the song but given that he only just managed to scrape a C in his GCSE Maths, this struck me as unlikely. Fearing the onset of a migraine as I tried to keep pace with all the complex rhythms, counterpoint tunes and angular melodies I persuaded Darren to move to the back of the crowd so I might concentrate on my Proust.

No such luck, though. It was as the band launched into a long, sprawling instrumental piece called ‘Trigonometry’ that Darren went off on a tangent:

‘Sophie tells me that she and Dylan are going to Barcelona for the weekend – with Stuart,’ he said.

‘That’s nice,’ I said. Page 29 of In Search of Lost Time really was a terrific one.

‘Dylan’s very excited, by all accounts. He’s always wanted to go,’ continued Darren. ‘They’re watching a game at the Nou Camp on Saturday night.’

‘Splendid,’ I said. Yes, page 29 was definitely one of the best pages I’d come across so far.

‘Sophie said that you had often talked about going there with Dylan. But you’d never quite got around to organising anything.’

‘Fantastic,’ I said. I wondered how this page 29 stacked up against all the other page 29s I’d read. Early indications were favourable.

‘It’s really generous of Stuart, isn’t it? Dylan’s sixteen today, isn’t he?’

Dylan’s birthday! Darren was still talking but I was out the door before you could state that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. If I ran, I might just have time to buy a card from the shop on the corner, get some money from the cashpoint across the way, bung it inside and post it through Sophie and Dylan’s letter box before midnight.

Wednesday March 28th

In Search of Lost Tomes

I had forgotten that –

for a long time – I went to bed early,

seduced by Proust,

who so often had le mot juste

about affairs of the heart

and the nature of art,