Take Cover

The professorthrupiece.com Escalated Celebrity Complaints Department has received the following communication from Threadbone Corporation CEO, CFO, Chair and President, Mrs Amanda J Threadbone which it is pleased [surely "privileged" [Ed]] to publish in full and without editorial comment or amendment.

Sir

I take the unprecedented step of writing to you directly - ordinarily correspondence between us has been conducted through my solicitors Threadbone, Threadbone and Threadbone - to protest your [possibly inadvertent] perpetuation of a now famous calumny, namely the insistence that the John Bull Magazine cover featuring Professor Thrupiece relaxing with a woman on a sofa in 1965 is a portrayal of the distinguished academic in the company of myself - moi - on my sofa in a room in my house. What nonsense.

That cover. Distinguished Dorset entrepreneur Mrs Amanda J Threadbone insists that the longstanding assumption that the portrait is of her is well wide of the mark.

As I made clear at the time and have constantly re-iterated, the woman - whose indefensible posture [see below] will be obvious to anyone who has attended a decent Swiss finishing school - is in fact Ms - later Dr - Audrey Badminton-Court who worked alongside Professor Thrupiece in his Cambridge laboratories aiding him in a series of high-level experiments which would eventually lead to the complete elaboration of the Thrupiece Tables [See Professor Thrupiece: The Corporate Story HERE.] [I have long maintained that peering down a microscope 24/7 in a regulation issue lab coat is bound to result in the spinal condition - commonly called "slouching" - from which Ms Badminton-Court self-evidently suffered.] Be that as it may and - as any fool can see for himself [oops [Ed]] - Ms Badminton-Court and I do not share even a passing resemblance either in appearance or character and it is a schoolboy error to imagine for one millisecond that the [admittedly fashionable and well-presented] Ms Badminton Court and I could ever be mistaken for each other*.

* Much as I like Ms Badminton Court, I can only say that she has always struck me as a woman drawn from the sort of stock that bought its own furniture. I, needless, to say did not.

Anyone in the slightest doubt about the subject[s] of the portrait might ask themselves any one of several simple but wholly discriminating questions: [i] would I match a yellow and white striped sofa with red curtains and a blue carpet? NO; [ii] would I set up and tolerate such a mean-spirited micro-Christmas tree and its appallingly middle-class decorations? NO again; [iii] did Professor Thrupiece ever bear a look of such exhaustion, dejection and ennui whilst in my inspiriting presence? Thrice NO; and finally [iv] would I ever own, let alone exhibit, such hideously utilitarian canteen-appropriate crockery? NO, NO, NO and NO again! My companion and houseboy Enrique de los Chicos Perdidos would be the first to confirm that dans le menage Threadbone, Threadbone china is the only game in town whether for a robust Lapsang or a delicate citrus-infused Orange Pekoe.

For your further edification, I enclose below a framed cover of a John Bull Magazine which I did agree to grace with my presence - the April 1965 edition which joyously celebrated [as I did not] my wedding to [and subsequent honeymoon with] the late Mr Threadbone. The observant amongst your readership will note that Professor Thrupiece was the best man and that Ms Cecelia Notso-Pointy was in attendance as were two unidentified girl guides [from Mr Threadbone's side] and a man claiming to be Sir Harry Lauder but who I immediately suspected was a drinking companion of Mr Threadbone's. He assured me they had met at an agricultural equipment sale but I am certain it was more likely the snug of the Boot and Bracket in Little Bredy. The man was a moron. Shortly after arriving uninvited at our reception he pulled something unimaginable out of the front of his trousers and invited me to blow into his bagpipe. I have had little regard for the Scots as a nation from that day onwards.

Life, as many of your readers will know, has its defining moments. This - together with my mercifully shortened honeymoon [of which Mr Martin Amis has provided a movingly fictionalised account*] - was certainly one of them.

Sincerely

Mrs Amanda J Threadbone

Great Heaving

* see M. Amis On Chettle Beach [Threadbone Modern Fiction Classics] [Ed].

Cover of John Bull Magazine featuring the wedding of Mr and Mrs Threadbone. The frame is heavy gilt - so called because it induced in the late Mr Threadbone a good deal of heavy guilt.