| Mrs Agitha Furbrush, a greyish woman with a lantern jaw, wall-mounted-lamp eyes and a radiant smile (visible at over 70 Theritsons on a clear night) is rumoured to have knitted the island’s first recorded scarf, though she attempted unsuccessfully to patent it at The Idea Bureau as a ‘portable neck-chimney’. The patent was rejected on four different counts, not least of which was the presence of a dank musty odour emanating from the wool, which suggested Mrs Furbrush had been using the ‘neck chimney’ for a variety of unsavoury additional functions. The initial triangular shape of her design and it’s four-dimensional qualities (which meant that opposing ends of the scarf could be – annoyingly - in either the past or future at any one time), were cited as the main reasons for rejection. Mrs Furbrush refused to accept the board’s decision however and continued to plague all seven judges with very, very slightly modified versions of her original design over the following 65 cycles, long after their retirement and the subsequent disbanding of The Idea Bureau and its reformation as The Newness Society. Mrs Furbrush suffered a wool-based accident at home, after learning that her rival, Mrs Unchant, had beaten her to it and successfully patented ‘The Throat-sock’, which later became known as the more familiar ‘Skarav’ or ‘Scarf’ which we know-of of today. |
