It looks rather as though my amazing friend Professor Purplepen has seen something shocking on the other side of the meeting room at The Rugby Tavern, Great James Street, Holborn, but this turned out to be the only clear photo I took from her lecture on (as you can see) 'Dracula and Classical Antiquity' to the Dracula Society yesterday. Red-papered and decorated with sporting prints and old caricatures by Spy and the like, it was a room which yearned to be smoke-filled, but of course wasn't: instead it was crowded with enthusiasts and at one stage piled with food. I ended up seated next to the remains of the buffet during the talk and it was all I could do to restrain myself from grazing from them to the point of illness.
We think it's the first time we have managed to meet in 11 years, though are not entirely sure: the last occasion seems to have been when the Professor and a friend succeeded in visiting me at The Ruin, Grewelthorpe, during my week there back in 2008. She drew my attention to a quotation in the lecture from Eusebius, a wonderfully Gothic peroration about demons, not strictly included for my amusement but which nevertheless could have been.
Every now and then there was a rumbling from the hallway outside as though a tumbril of heads was being transferred, but was probably only a trolley of glasses, and on two occasions I went through the bar downstairs they were playing Siouxsie and the Banshees.
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