Le Cerf Noir
The grainy sepia-toned picture resolves itself. A man, sat hunched at his desk, typing away on a computer. The bowl of soup in front of him says it's lunch time. He clicks around the screen, flicking from site-to-site, link-to-link. The shot changes and his face is shown, illuminated in the glare of his monitor. His grizzled, bearded visage bears the thousand-yard stare and faintly disturbing grin of the exhausted but happy. A crackly voiceover crackles its crackly way through the speakers, a voice like an old sleuth chewing on a fat Havana. "Monday morning and I'm shot through. This weekend just about finished me off. First, some crazy dame and her old man turn up, bundle me into their car and escort my ass way-the-hell north, to some one-horse town in Scotland. Then, they dress me up in all this lycra and send me out to run myself ragged. The Mighty Deerstalker, they called it. Like an invite to a duel, but I'm an old hand, I've run that race many times befo...