What these sweet old auntie-like ladies say next turns you in your tracks. Taking a seat at the available table adjacent, and taking up the worn menu card, as if to read and decide on your possible choices for luncheon, you listen --

"Mister Roosevelt, Dear. He is the locus in this timeline, after all."

"Oh, not after all, surely."

"Well, then probably, Dear."

"Oh, you and your probabilities again! They're what have us in this sort of predicament again -- and again, you know!"

Sudden as an explosion, your nemesis, the giant of a hotelier, bursts in through the French doors -- one of which knocks back the kind-hearted Spanish waiter into a wilting potted palm. Carafe in hand, the hotelier crosses the restaurant in amazingly few strides, tips himself over the ladies' table, tops up their milk teas with tepid coffee.

"Everything to your satisfaction, is it, ladies?"

"Oh, yes, it is!"

"--And thank-you so much for asking, Mister Fawlty!"

Beaming -- just the same as he had before, triumphant, with your Nigella across the register -- Mister Fawlty meanders near enough other luncheoners that some of them raise their coffee cups, expecting he should re-fill them.

But he is lost in his own moment -- "A little courtesy is all anyone might ask --."

Underneath Mister Fawlty's sermon on the state of Empire, you can just make out the ladies murmuring behind your right ear --

"But he is vital to our efforts."

"This is a lovely bit of ham."

"Oh, it is, Dear -- and Danish, I believe Connie said."

RATE THIS BRANCH!