| The hallway.
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| From outside, an ordinary house. |
| A great house, true — four hundred and eighty
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| three rooms, each one with its own marble wash basin and douche,
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| bidet as it may. |
| But inside, and the positions are reversed. |
| A human failing,
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| some say a disease, but a disease that Sir Francis Dashwood knew,
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| and knew it well.
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| Upstairs, inside and a revelation. |
| It’s a discotheque. |
| No, no, uh. |
| there
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| are paintings, real, and look here — a rare seventeenth century masterpiece,
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| and if I can scrape a little of it off, beneath I can find hidden a fourteenth
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| century underpiece.
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| Made entirely of tiny pieces of eggshells, this lurid work has caused
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| controversy in the world of embroidery and anthropologicky. |
| No, I’ll say it
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| again, anthropolology. |
| Umm. |
| no quite possibly make an anthropol, no, uh,
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| I mean an apolog.ph. |
| It has enthralled distinguished professors,
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| and in layman’s language is «blinking well baffling».
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| But to be more obtusely, «buggered if I know."Yes, «buggered if I know.
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| «And that’s all we’ve gleaned so far from experts in fourteenth century
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| painting, renaissance, greengrocers, and recently revived members of the public.
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| Buggered if I know.
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| Vivian Stanshall, about three o’clock in the morning,
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| Oxfordshire, 1973, Goodnight |