I'm sure I read somewhere that ancient Britons

I'm sure I read somewhere that ancient Britons dressed as grey herons to scare the Romans. It didn't go well for them and since then heron or any bird fancy dress has not been incl

uded by British politicians and royals when Italian diplomats come to visit. The long history of Brits using weird bird outfits to scare Romans has made Italians nervous of feather

-shaped handbags, which were the latest in Notting Hill. Maps in hand, the Italians frowned at where Brit politicians performed dangerous stunts off Big Ben. What a strange country

fellow was that Big Ben. He was three km high if he was a cm, and could spin a yarn that would reach Pluto if you got him started! But math -- he couldn't add or multiply to save

his mother. Was there something wrong with him? Maybe. He may never know if the thing that possibly saves his own life, involves the hardest kind if math.

The math of oblongness. He wanted to explain the shape of his mother. Her belly was becoming more oblong by the week. He calculated that her curcumference time her

inverse diameter was 4.671739442 etc., never repeating -- a new transcendental number he called "mom." He loved mom very much, but so did his colleagues. He wanted to protect her,

just as she protected him from synchronistic contretemps and random events. Not every kid had a transcendental number for a Mom and knew it, but when his colleagues came a-courting

The snow was just starting to fall and I sat by the fire thinking.

Time to move on, I thought.