Back at the old grey school, we had for a short, weird while a rather colourful English teacher called Tim Mowl.
Totally unbidden, a memory popped into my head this afternoon of a short story he once read to us, called ‘The Mezzotint’. My memory might be playing tricks, but I seem to recall that on that particular afternoon we, me and my fellows of the Lower Remove 2, were having our English lesson in the Physics lab for some reason. ‘The Mezzotint’ is a ghost story, and having it read to us in the cavernous Victorian laboratory seemed most appropriate. Using that most fiendishly efficient internet search engine, I resolved to track the story down and read it again.
I was expecting to have to order the book from Amazon, but it turns out that it was written by M R James, and thanks to Mr Charles Tyson you can read the whole story for yourself on the web. You might also want to explore the rest of Mr Tyson’s web site – it’s not quite like any other, and I rather like the whole enterprise. Well, anyone who describes his own solitaire computer game as ‘incorrigibly free’ can’t be such a rum cove, can he?