things move around

Grent is liasing with a man by the name of Winsor, down on the fourth floor. I keep making my little joke about Grent visiting the house of Winsor, but I don’t think he knows who or what the house of Windsor is. He just says “err, yeah”. You can see him thinking “house of Winsor? What? I’m going to his office, not his house”.

At lunchtime I read out a couple of crossword clues.

Me: California vet may make a bloomer, seven and six. It’s an anagram. A kind of flower. Any ideas?
Grent: It’s what kind of flower?
Me: That’s the question. What kind of flower is it? An anagram of ‘California vet’.
Grent: I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Me: Rearrange the letters of ‘California vet’ to make a kind of flower. Two words, seven and six.
Grent: I don’t know.
Brant: African violet.
Me: Thanks!
Grent: African violet?! What is that? You have to be on crack to do those crosswords.

It crosses my mind that Brant is some kind of anagramming idiot-savant, like the denizens of ‘Dictionary Corner’ on the TV show ‘Countdown’, so I toss a few more in his direction. These meet with no success, but he could be dissimulating - nervous of revealing further inspiration in the totemic presence of the obdurately linear Grent. I am sure that deep within Brant there is a kernel of genius, dormant but alive beneath sediment-layers of literalism, whereas at Grent’s core there is nothing but a gelid vacuum, dark and baleful, devouring ingenuity and fancy as a black hole devours light itself.