Biography
Sir Arthur was the son of Lady Beryl Streeb-Greebling - a 'wonderful dancer' who was still dancing at 107 years of age, and who was capable of breaking a swan's wing with a blow of her nose - who inspired him to take up his life's work of teaching ravens to fly underwater. Sir Arthur claims "She came up to me in the conservatory - I was pruning some walnuts - and she said 'Arthur -- I wasn't Sir Arthur in those days -- if you don't get underwater and start teaching ravens to fly, I'll smash your stupid face off,' and I think it was this that sort of first started my interest in the whole business." However, his work was largely inconsequential. When Dudley's interviewer asks "Is it difficult to get ravens to fly underwater?" his honest response is "Well, I think the word difficult is an awfully good one here. Yes, it is. It's nigh impossible... There they are sitting on my wrist. I say 'Fly! Fly you little devils!!'... (then) they drown. Little black feathery figure topples off my wrist and spirals to a watery grave. We're knee deep in feathers off that part of the coast... not a single success in the whole forty years of training" When a perplexed Dudley asks if this makes his life a miserable failure, Sir Arthur is forced to reply "My life has been a miserable failure, yes."
Sir Arthur's 35 years as a restaurateur were nothing short of disastrous. His restaurant, The Frog and Peach was a catastrophic failure, owing to its location - in the middle of a bog in the heart of the Yorkshire Moors, and its very limited menu - the "nauseating" Frog à la Peche and the "positively revolting" Peche à la Frog.
It was Sir Arthur's father who inspired his life's other work: the study of worms. Sir Arthur's father claimed to have found the world's longest worm, at approximately three thousand miles. He came across the head in the Andes and spent five years tracing it back to the Azores. However, accusations were made that he had actually discovered the head of one worm in the Andes and the tail of another worm in the Azores. As a result, Streeb-Greebling spent a great deal of his life trying to encourage worms to speak to him, again to no avail.
Read more about this topic: Arthur Streeb-Greebling
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