The sleepy tranquillity of the French spa town of D… was clamorously disturbed recently when a gang of so-called Holy Rollers—ritually tattooed anarchist girls from the outlying suburbs, their nipple-rings perversely profiled beneath tight latex bodysuits, their nerves taut from ingesting massive doses of homemade crystal methedrine fabricated in their clubhouse (a deconsecrated presbytery left immaculate in the wake of frequent amphetamine binges)—thundered into town on their souped-up Vespas and lobbed a brash brick through the window of V8, a store specializing in ‘20th century artefacts’ (the proprietors, Randy Pfister and Todd McQueen, having for some years been at the forefront of their field in New York with a store of the same name, had moved its contents virtually holus-bolus to the pilgrim town when AIDS-stricken Randy, an ardent Roman Catholic tired of the depressing diet of drugs he was being administered, opted for the obscure promise of faith healing), from which they proceeded to loot various randomly selected items, including an irreplaceable collection of fifty-three postcards of motorcades, formerly in the possession of King Farouk; a child’s kite from Weimar Germany, its plywood frame colourfully papered with billions of inflated marks; a drawing by Olivier Daubigny-Daubrée depicting a desktop scattered with pens and ink pots, on which an art deco statuette of a female figure-skater functions as a paperweight holding down one of Daubigny-Daubrée’s own unfinished sketches, a meticulous cross-hatched representation of a philatelist, tweezers in hand, seated at an ornate desk in a book-lined study; the first commercially produced Biro; a gouache dated 1937, bearing the stamp of the Winston Craven industrial design studio and illustrating a delirious proposal for a high-speed covered chrome and aluminium moving footway linking Brooklyn and Manhattan; and unique color super 8 footage of the 1961 tragedy involving the Black Hornets, the precision flying team of the Royal Nigerian Air Force, a crack British-trained élite under the command of Squadron Leader Edward Oldibiri, a brilliant ex-Oxonian who reluctantly interrupted a promising thesis devoted to—ironically enough—the Icarus myth in 20th century English literature in order to join the RNAF, a decision that did not spell total disengagement from his first love, as was demonstrated in somewhat tragic circumstances on 13th January, 1961, date of the first annual aerial display in Lagos and, incidentally, the twentieth anniversary of James Joyce’s death, a coincidence that inspired Oldibiri to conceive and execute an unusual homage in the form of an aerobatic skywriting demonstration, a display described by the verbally agile airman as ‘supersonic and boustrophedonic’ and that was to consist of the four Black Hornets in their Hawker Hunters simultaneously tracing allotted portions of the opening sentence of Finnegans Wake from alternate directions in the serene azure sky high above the Gulf of Guinea, explicit instructions being given to ignore punctuation marks unless they wanted to ‘comma cropper’, a warning taken to heart by both Tunji Gabangida and Ibrahim Abiola but studiously ignored by the youngest Hornet, William Abayomi, who, while impeccably inscribing his assigned text, insisted upon vaingloriously supplying a mid-line pause, a flourish that caused his wingtip to brush Gabangida’s and thereby precipitate the fiery plunge earthwards of both jets before a horrified crowd of spectators conservatively estimated at 25,000.