Drat! The Professor was here, and I missed him!

That is to say, he was “here” if you define “here” as “in this country.” I learned that obliquely this morning, from this Tweet:

So very lovely to come back from the states and find nearly all of my twitter friends talking about the weather. #comforting #likeanicesoup.

What?!? He was on this side of the pond, and I missed him? Confound the luck. It’s enough to make a chap want to don his fighting trousers.

I wrote to the Professor to express my dismay in the strongest terms, and by way of consolation he replied,

@BradWarthen I’ll be in San francisco at the end of january if that’s any help old chap. #edwardianball

Well, that would be just as lovely as a cup of the brown stuff, if not for the fact that this country has grown a bit since we were colonies (the news may not have traveled back to the Old World as yet), and S.F. is hardly nearer than Brighton…

For those of you not among the cognoscenti, Professor Elemental (known to his particular friends as Paul Alborough), is the master of Chap-hop, a sort of cultural offshoot of the Steampunk sensibility.

He’s also one of my highly valued celebrity followers on Twitter, along with the inimitable Adam Baldwin. I feel honored by this, naturally, even though he does follow 27,389 others. (There are those who might call him indiscriminate, but if they do, I’m certain that the Professor will demand satisfaction. Perhaps he’ll ask me to be his second, if the other 27,389 are busy.)

But I still would very much like to see his act in person. So here’s hoping that next time he comes to the East Coast, he’s not booked by the same agents who chose where “Tinker, Tailor” would be screened…