So, how did I meet Wolverine?  Chess.  Wolverine and I liked online chess.  I had a quality that endeared me to him.  I always lost.  Snarlson played too.  I also always lost to him, but Snarlson won as many games as he lost against Wolverine.  Wolverine complained that Snarlson practiced too much.  “Tucker has no spirit of the true amateur in him.  I know he practices.  He refuses to let raw talent speak for itself.”  “Snarlson,” Wolverine conjected, “would think better about politics if he thought more about it rather than practice chess.” 

Wolverine and I began having conversations via Skype. Even without meeting him cat-to-badger, during Skype chats he gave me his bio.  The rest I got by hunting copies of his thrice-weekly column, “Lawless Roaming.”  The column was a bit like reading a crueler, less truthful version of Auberon “Bron” Waugh’s writing.  Wolverine’s enemies spread a rumor that Evelyn Waugh was his biological father.  If you have heard anything about the morals of Constance Lawless, Wolverine’s mummy, the rumor about EW’s paternity verges on incontestable if she ever did meet Waugh.

Wolverine grew up in Michigan peninsula near the US/Canada line.  Wolverine’s putative father, Rapacious Lawless, had vast holdings that he had attained from logging, drug-running and cruelty to beavers. Rapacious hired beavers rather than ordinary loggers.  He worked them like galley slaves.  Beware to any grumblers, unionists, crybeavers, eggheads, pensioners, or unproductive or loafing beavers.  Any troublesome beaver was headed to a milliner in preparation for years on a hat rack.  Rapacious believed with all his heart that it was a crime against wealth to coddle beavers or any other employee.  It was a belief that made him rich. 

Wolverine’s rich parents bought his way into Eton.  They noticed the boy had a gift for languages.  From an early age, he learnt fluent wolverine, beaver, badger, cat, English, and other language.  The polyglot Wolverine arrived at Eton.  His mother Constance hoped his time at Eton would make him more presentable.  For example, Rapacious, educated in the woods, moved about naked on all fours.  That was fine on the Michigan panhandle, but Constance Lawless wanted a gentleman son.   Eton made Wolverine bipedal, taught him how to dress in a myriad of correct styles, imposed Latin and Greek on him, made his manners elegant, his accent posh, and familiarized him with le vice anglais and the Sodomite predilections of English richlings and their teachers.  He made the mistake of speaking out against sodomy to his mum.  It earned him a dirty look.  “Tsk, tsk,” she said, “I dare say Octavius Caesar would have ended a nobody had he been a prissy prude like you.  If I’ve flourished doing it—just look at my bright eyes and bushy tail–there’s not a reason on earth that you can’t too.”  Wolverine knew better than to defy Constance.  He promised to do better in the future.  It never hurt his career on the English side of the Great Pond.  It got his column “Lawless Roaming” jump-started when he left Eton.  It also got him introduced to all the rich buggers that run the world of journalism. (to be continued)*

*I’m pleased to announce that my blog has undoubtedly been the proximate cause of MP Parish’s decision to give up his seat as a backbencher.