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| Mark - I've Changed My Mind |
The boys heard about the story in an interview on the radio.
The Professor of History at the University, described as bookish, eccentric and absent minded,
had just found out that he was the owner of a valuable painting by Canaletto
The boys thought Canaletto was a kind of ice cream, but they knew what a fast buck was.
They just had to break his window at night and snatch the valuable painting off the wall
They'd be able to sell it on at the Car Boot sale, before he was even up in the morning.
Unfortunately the boys didn't listen right through to the end of the interview
If they had, they'd have heard that he wasn't your average Professor of History.
He'd been a martial arts champion in the army and was still a part-time cage fighter.
His eccentricities included weight training in his basement at night, to combat insomnia.
It wasn't really the boy's fault that they got caught.
There was no alarm on the building and they didn't make a lot of noise getting in.
The radio report had even told them exactly where the painting was hung.
The weight room was very well insulated, you couldn't hear - or be heard in there
But it chanced in the middle of his workout, that the Professor remembered
that he needed to check a reference in the library for his lecture in the morning.
The boys were quite shocked to be confronted by a muscular man in his underpants.
They were even more surprised how he took control of the situation and of them,
using a confident, assertive manner, honed on years of taming wild students.
He made them feel mistaken not bad, just deprived of proper rearing and guidance.
He said it didn't feel right to call in the Police and unleash the power of the courts,
when a little friendly instruction might set them on the road to more fulfilling lives.
Later the boys couldn't remember quite how he persuaded them to take off their clothes
There was something about discarding preconceptions, becoming equals, man to man.
They thought preconceptions was about too many beers before sex with the girlfriend.
He said he would not turn them in but show them something special instead.
and once they were nearly naked it wasn't that easy to just turn and leave,
or to back out of the agreement which it seemed they had made without knowing.
Persuaded and intimidated by their mentor's strength and skills
the boys felt their best course, their only course, was to bend
and receive the traditional rebuke for youthful mistakes.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Photo-manip by 'Mark at Jockspank