* The Curious Tale of Mr.B *

When Mr.B was a little boy he had a strange habit. He collected clouds. He would walk around with his arms held up to the sky. He had made himself a small telescope so he could see the clouds more clearly. People would turn their heads and stare at him in the street but he didn’t care.

His maths teacher would reprimand him for gazing out of the classroom window during lessons but Mr.B just kept looking at the clouds. He held a set square up in the air and measured them. That one looks like Grandad. And he wrote in his notebook: “Granddad Cloud, August 30th, midday, 13 centimetres. Sky: Cobalt blue. Cloud colour: Splash of milk”.

A little troubled by their son’s obsession, Mr.B’s parents bought him a globe in an attempt to steer him towards other activities. But Mr.B, who was neither stupid nor lazy, simply created a parallel world of invented countries with their own imaginary cities. The scale of those countries was up to him to decide, as were their political, social and economic systems, the rivers that ran through them, and what kind of traditional dress the inhabitants wore. Marmiteland, Stain Niteene, Piliaran Valley are some names he made up.

When Mr.B was older, he got a job working for the Post Office, where he collected faces. Every time he delivered a letter, he would take note of the person’s reaction: “The lady from Pegleg Street, number 5b, made a little cry when I delivered her electricity bill”; “The young woman in the fishmonger’s smiled shyly when she received news from her boyfriend in London”. And Mr.B would note all this down in his notebook.

Mr.B later retired but he never stopped collecting all manner of implausible things. He collected sweets with strange flavours, and that is how he discovered that in China, children eat lotus flower jelly beans and in Argentina they have fudge flavour sweets.

He had little bottles containing raindrops, he collected pregnant women’s food cravings, which he wrote down in a notebook embroidered by hand. In another notebook, which was red, he collected all kinds of interesting words, words like ‘onomatopoeia’, smash, paella, ‘spear’, ‘gazelle’, finisterre, and ‘pistil’.

He kept eyelashes and wishes people made, he collected olive pits, spelling mistakes and old 45”s of female singers from English post-war. He also collected moments in his life, like the one where a girl told him how she liked to swim in the sea when it was raining, or the time there was a storm which almost ruined his collection of books because he had left the windows open and the rain came in.Mr.B currently resides in Hampstead. You can visit his home/museum for the price of a small donation –desserts and cakes are welcome too-. However, it is not recommended that you go wearing red buttons. His latest fascination is for coloured buttons, which he collects from dawn till dusk, and it seems his collection is not yet complet.