Ex Nilio Animus Abracadabra

The cobbler Peeps cobbled shoes and resoled whatever needed resoling. He wore a cobbler’s apron made from plastic and a green viridian toque with tassels. He spoke in grunts and sighs and seldom if ever wore the same apron twice, or the same shoes, hobnailed or soft-soled. The man in the hat knew of the cobbler Peeps but had never made is formal acquaintance. He couldn’t afford resoling or cobbling so had very little cause to visit a cobbler. He shimmed cardboard flats and stuffed crumpled newspaper in the toes of his shoes, thereby bypassing the need for professional shoeing. Corpse-gaseous with fen and gall, those of us unlucky enough to have read De Animus have a good deal of forgetting to do. The cobbler Peeps preferred Plato to Aristotle, resoling to cross-stitching and bootblack to polish. ‘These are strange times’ thought the man in the hat, ‘strange indeed’. He pocketed his pocket-comb and said: ex nilio animus abracadabra, and fretted his way down the sideways. If the world is all there is, his was a world of doublespeak and innuendo, sighs and grunts, crows and corpse-gas, resoled shoes and crumpled newspaper.