I was sitting there alone in the quadrangle entirely by the grace of Metamorphosis Briggs. Metamorphosis taught Tech Drag, which was the unfortunate abbreviation on the class timetable for the subject of Solid Geometry and Technical Drawing; unfortunate because at that time it had just become very fashionable to call anything that wasn’t very interesting a ‘drag’. Metamorphosis hated me initially because it was me who had heard of Kafka’s story and I was able to voice the opinion that Brigg’s appearance suggested a similar fate had befallen him, only somehow he got stuck halfway...
    Like a child pulling a face when the wind changes... It was the fact that the name was very apt, and stuck, that was so unforgivable.

“All right,” said Rose. “We’ll go down to the Lake and torpedo the Louisa.”
“Don’t talk silly, miss. You can’t do that. Honest you can’t. I told you before. We can’t get down the river.”
“Spengler did.”
“In a canoe, miss, wiv—”
“That just shows we can, too.”
Allnutt sighed ostentatiously. He knew perfectly well that there was no possible chance of inducing the African Queen to make the descent of the rapids of the Ulanga.
    Yes, it’s The African Queen, by C. S. Forester, the literary bane of German warships; with a WWI tale set in East Africa  of how a grotty gin-swilling river trader and a stiff-back missionary lady are obliged to join forces and run the leaky boat of the title down a treacherous waterway to attack a German gunboat. It combined the forces of Humphrey Bogart (for which role he  got a long-overdue Oscar) and Katherine Hepburn with John Huston, and their adventures in making the film are almost as legendary as the movie itself. But these matters will be dealt with as they arise.