Last night I dreamed up a new movie for Charlie Chaplin's oeuvre, a film called The Two Fops that I was watching in my sleep, until Tom came to bed and I woke up and told him about the movie, and he laughed and said, "What is a fop?"

So I explained the definition of fop, and then this morning I googled the title, just in case there really was a movie by that name. I did not discover a movie, but the British Museum does own a Jean Louis Forain print, Les Deux Gommeux, whose title translates as The Two Fops, and it looks remarkably like a still from my imaginary silent movie. Of course I have never seen this print before.

So that is today's weird brain invention-conflation. The whole thing feels very Iris Murdoch. Perhaps I will shortly have a strange philosophical obsession with the print curator at the British Museum, who will turn out to be having an affair with my sister-in-law, who herself is involved with an odd cultish group studying the bones of Richard III, and all the women in our story will be wearing beautiful brightly colored clothes, and the men will be slightly sweaty and wear nylon undershirts beneath their business suits, and we will walk on pebble beaches in inappropriate shoes, and one of us will own an all-seeing dog who rescues someone or other from an undersea grotto, and The Two Fops will be reprinted ambiguously on the book cover.