He had never married, and as a result of receiving a very healthy inheritance from a rich uncle when he was a young man, he never felt the need to seek out any form of meaningful employment. Whereas some may have seen him as part of the idle rich, this was in fact not the case. He had, in fact, spent almost thirty years working diligently on his magnum opus. This daunting task was driven by his passion, and based on his lifelong love, of knitting. It was this obsession with the nuances of the craft that drove him to make it the topic of his major work. A large tome entitled ‘The Complete and Ultimate History of Knitting’.
This epic work covered the entire known history of the craft. It comprised of a great rambling description of knitting through the ages from the time of the discovery of knitted items, dating from the period between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, in Egypt. Followed by the spreading of it through Europe and into Britain during the sixteenth century. Then into the Scottish Isles, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, before the huge changes that came about during the Industrial Revolution. This being followed by people knitting clothes for soldiers during the Second World War, then on to the revolution in machine-knitted items during the nineteenth century. All this culminating, when coming into the twentieth century, the ease with which people were now able to gain vast amounts of knowledge on the subject through the internet.
This was a great ambling treatise, presented in the most excruciating detail.
Finally, the day came when the man, now in his early sixties, prepared his five hundred odd page manuscript in a large padded postal package, addressing it to one of the largest and most prestigious publishing houses in the city.
This was followed by a lull of several weeks during which time he was, instead of working on his opus, spending long days in a state of agitated anticipation, waiting for a response from the publishing company.
At last, the day came when his manuscript was returned. It came back in the same large postage bag he had sent it in, with the original address obliterated with a heavy black permanent marker pen.
Inside he found his manuscript… along with a small tin of lighter fluid and a box of matches!
