The Life and Likings of a Lobster

Title: The Life and Likings of a Lobster 

Author: Not known 

Publisher: Not known 

Source book: The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm by Norman Hunter

I know very little about lobsters, except that they have blue blood, or is it green, so I can’t begin to speculate what mysteries of the universe might be highlighted in The Life and Likings of a Lobster, but I can tell you this: Professor Branestawm borrows a book about lobsters from Great Pagwell Public Library. The Professor is notoriously absent-minded and loses the book at once. Anxious to read about lobsters he borrows another copy of the book from Little Pagwell Library. And takes that home but loses that too. It isn’t under the sofa, although he does find a bone left by Mrs Flittersnoop’s sister’s dog. 

Still wanting to read about lobsters, he borrows another copy from Lower Pagwell. And then he loses that so needs to borrow from Pagwell Town Library, then from Pagwell Village, Old Pagwell, New Pagwell, North Pagwell, South Pagwell, West Pagwell, Pagwell Central, Pagwell Hill and Pagwell Docks, not to mention Pagwell Gardens. I’m quite surprised to note that there isn’t a library in East Pagwell, although maybe there isn’t an East Pagwell. For some reason I thought there was also a Pagwell Parva but perhaps it’s too small to have a library.

The Professor is reduced to borrowing Colonel Deadshot’s penny-farthing bicycle to get from library to library more quickly in order to return, and then take out again, the only copy he hasn’t managed to lose. He’s not very good at bicycling and finds it exhausting. However, all the local library men come to tea, and the conversation, as it so often does, gets around to the life of the lobster. The Professor is asked to look up a fact in The Life and Likings of a Lobster because the library man from Pagwell Docks remembers he’s borrowed this book. Certainly, says the Professor, it’s upstairs. So he runs upstairs, climbs down the drainpipe, bicycles like a maniac to Pagwell Town and rushes home. 

By the time Professor Branestawm gets back to his house, crawls up the drainpipe and staggers back down the stairs with the Pagwell Town copy in his hands, the library men have truffled out all the copies from the his bookshelves. He had filed each copy under a different category: under “lobsters”, under “deep sea fishing”, under “natural history” etc. 

The only problem with this story is that the Professor had already borrowed the lobster book from the Pagwell Town Library, but let us imagine they had more than one copy.

Fabulous Lobster tapestry designed by Kaffe Fassett from Ehrman Tapestry 
(images borrowed from the internet)