“So did you catch the latest episode of The Apprentice, Barnaby?” Cecil asks, foraging deep into his heavy traditional English breakfast. A change of pace for us, for him. 
Out with the grains, oats, nuts and fruits, our usual fare on these morning meetings. “Sometimes you just crave unhealthy, you know?” he said. “Load up with all the artery hardening, blood thickening goodness.” There was lots of meat on his plate, that is for sure. A lot of meat. Bacon. Sausage. Blood pudding. So much meat. Pork-riddled beans. Bread, not toasted but fried. Along with three fried eggs. The only nod to the garden being a few slices of grilled tomato.
“You know that’s why England set sail to conquer the world, don’t you Cecil?” I said when his plate arrived at the table. “A quest for a little subtlety of cuisine.” He was already busy slashing and stabbing away at the food in front of him.
“The Apprentice?” I asked. “You mean th—”
“Mr. Carney Goes to Washington!” he interrupted, reverting to his more primitive self, with a mouthful of dead animal.
Ahh!
Our newly elected Prime Minister’s first face-to-face with the orangeman currently occupying the White House.
I’d seen the clips, I told Cecil. It was as much as I could bear, as much as I can ever bear, frankly. Small doses. Nothing extended. Otherwise, you feel yourself soiled with grey matter, snared directly into his brain, like one of those carnivorous flowers, the flytrap. Entombed into an unfiltered space where every impulse, every lie and fairy tale, every synaptic snapping is given voice, no modulation, no reconsideration, no second thoughts, no alterations, no regrets. Do-overs and mulligans reserved exclusively for the golf course.
“He fared alright,” Cecil tells me, leaning back in his seat, making room for more of his breakfast it looked like which, from my vantage, appeared to be a plate barely dented. “Our man, Mark Carney. Made one point. Canada’s not for sale. Full stop. Firm but reasonable. He called Trump ‘transformational’. Did you hear that? Note perfect, Barnaby. Completely neutral, the word ‘transformational’. Could be good transformational. Could be bad transformational. In this case, well. 
Everybody knew what he meant except the guy in the room who took it as a compliment because it was a big word directed at him. Must be good. Shook his head, all humble seeming, Ah, shucks. Me? Transformational? And then that pulled smirk of his, all Grinch-like minus the cunning shrewdness.”
Cecil picks up his cup of coffee, still waging something of an internal battle with his breakfast.
“Then the PM just sat back and let the man ramble. And can the man ever ramble. On and on. From one unrelated point to the next. As if he’s the only person in the room. As if this wasn’t a state visit. As if Canada American relations wasn’t the topic of the day. Just on and on. The Hooties. He kept saying. The Hooties. Like it was a new word to him. Like he had no idea what it meant. He just liked the sound of the word. The Hooties.”
Cecil stabs at a piece of sausage, I think it is. Pops it into his mouth. Chews, mouth open, as if he’s having to kill the animal it came from again.
“Then, it’s on to Obama’s library,” Cecil continues. “DEI this, DEI that. Woke, woke, woke. You probably don’t have these kind of problems in Canada, Mark,” he Trumps again. “Then he just winds down and the press throws more chum into the water.”
Cecil does a passable impersonation the man, I have to admit. Doesn’t overdo it. Emphasizes the outer borough in the New York twang.
“He reminds me of my old Oxford don,” Cecil says, once more leaning in his chair, coffee cup held thoughtfully with both hands.
Cecil is an Oxford man. Received his PhD in history there. With a focus on Gibbon. ‘The Creation of History: How Our Past is Produced Not Discovered’. Or something thereabouts. He’s not prone to wear such credentials on his sleeve much though. Just a retired high school social sciences teacher, he thinks of himself as.
“You’re comparing the current President of the United States to an Oxford scholar?”
“Bear with me here, Barnaby,” Cecil bids, holding a slice of grilled tomato up on his fork, inspecting it as if wondering what to do with it in the context of the rest of his breakfast.
“What was his name again?” I ask. “The professor?”
“Professor Beaulieu-Boyd,” he says with a flare and finally folds the tomato into his mouth.
That’s right. Profess Beaulieu-Boyd. Bede. An even more ancient historian his speciality.
“The Irish Ascendancy meets French Huguenots, he claimed,” Cecil tells me in between what looks to be slightly disagreeable swallows of tomato. “He’d invite eminent visitors to his rooms for informal gab sessions with various students and faculty members. And, this is where the comparison comes in, Barnaby, He’d then simply hold court. As if he was the one we’d come to hear. Wouldn’t let his guest get a word in edge wise. The Beaulieu-Boyd Hour, we’d call it. With today’s special guest… Not very original, I know. But you get the gist.”
As Cecil turns back to the plate in front of him, I wonder if that was it, his observation in its entirety. Slight but not inapt, I guess. More a general assessment than a pointed comparison.
“This one particular circumstance, Barnaby,” OK. Unlike with his food, Cecil wasn’t finished with this thought. “Double B, that’s what we called him, Professor Beaulieu-Boyd, Double B, he invited Billy Shirer, you know who I’m talking about, Billy Shirer? William Shirer?”
I nod to the affirmative. William L. Shirer. Historian. Author. The Rise and Fall of the 3rd Reich. Yes.
“That Billy Shirer,” Cecil continues. “Double B invites him to talk about the 20th-century which was coming to a close, more or less, a decade off or so. Shirer was quite old at the time. But still with it, as far as we could tell but Beaulieu-Boyd barely let him speak. He just went on and on about how he met Winnifred Wagner as a child when they were both in an orphanage in England for a bit. She wasn’t Wagner then. I forget what her name was, but she ended up being adopted by a German relative and then married off to Richard Wagner’s son, Siegfried, and wound up running Bayreuth after he died. She became friends with Hitler’s interior decorator, Gerdy Troost, and Hitler himself. Ended up an unrepentant Nazi, Winnifred Wagner, until the day she died, according to Double B who met her again when he was in Germany doing research for his doctrate. Seriously, Barnaby. That’s all he talked about. I think Shirer might’ve even fallen asleep during it all.”
With that, Cecil resumes eating his breakfast, shaking his head at the memory of it all, I guess.
“So maybe our Prime Minister should’ve fallen asleep in the Oval Office during his meeting with the President,” I suggest, jokingly.
Cecil chuckles in between bites.
“Why not?” he responds. “The President fell asleep during the Pope’s funeral. Did you see that, Barnaby?”
I hadn’t.
“He dressed in a blue suit too,” Cecil adds. “When requested to wear black.”
He continues to eat and shake his head in wonder and/or amazement. Difficult to know which. Is there a difference between the two?
“And how do you think your old subject of study, Mr. Eddie Gibbon, would be assessing our current situation if he were around to chronicle it, Cecil?”
This elicits a chuckle from him.
“That’s an easy one, Barnaby,” he says, popping a rasher of bacon into his mouth. “Gibbon considered history as, how’d he say it again? ‘Little more than the register of crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind’. Cecil tosses back another slice of bacon. “He’d be right at home with us today, that is for sure.”
With that, Cecil turns to the mound of fried potatoes on his plate. I forgot to mention the potatoes, didn’t I. It is a breakfast that waxes toward lunch. On and on, like the President and Cecil’s professor, Beaulieu-Boy, Double-B, holding court in his Oxford rooms in the waning years of the 20th century.