Plate 349:  A birthday gift for the builder and the designer
(This plate added FEB 2004)

The builder and the designer happen to celebrate their birthdays on exactly the same date. What is even more of a coincidence, the builder and the designer were both born on the same day of the same year. Even more remarkable is the fact that they were both born in the same city. One possible explanation for these coincidences is the additional fact that the builder and the designer share the same corporeal form. --more--

An attentive reader might interject at this point: "You mean, of course, that the builder and the designer are the same person." Whenever they are confronted with such an observation, the builder and the designer both insist: "We are not, most emphatically, the same person!" This is the only matter of importance upon which the builder and the designer are in complete agreement. Once, to a particularly skeptical interlocutor, the designer expanded upon his tenet that, although they shared the same corporeal form, the builder and the designer were distinct individuals: "This is a simple matter of two different mens in the same corpore, you see". Note: The designer, although more or less proficient in the relatively uninflected English language, is notably weak in his grasp of Latin declensions. Sometimes, when he is expatiating at his club's dining-table, he will decline Latin nouns correctly by sheer luck. At other times, his fellow club-members, after hearing him butcher an inflectional case or two, will politely steer the dining-table conversation to matters of topical interest. The designer continued: "It's something like Jekyll and Hyde, if you see what I mean." Here the designer was referring to the novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which was written by the celebrated Scottish writer Robert Louis (Balfour) Stevenson. "I think Stevenson summed up the idea very neatly!", the designer concluded. The builder, who had been listening to this colloquy, muttered "Jekyll and Hyde indeed. Unmitigated rubbish!" The builder disliked the novels of Robert Louis Stevenson, which he considered overly esoteric. He had once read up through page 5 of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde before throwing the book into the club's blazing fireplace with the vituperation: "Highfalutin nonsense!". The builder then returned happily to his well-thumbed Handbook of Immanuel Kant's Epistemology for the Practical Engineer. On the occasion of the builder's and designer's joint birthday-celebration of 2004, the two gentlemen presented each other with the gift shown in the accompanying photo: a Hornby model of a Stanier 8F Class locomotive. Much more will be said upon this subject in the following plates. Go to top of page