A tangled web

Life is a confused mix between order and disorder (or as Mandible Winkworth refers to it whenever he talks to Samuel Quinine, between maat and isfet. Only Magritude Feather would understand his conceptual referents, but she is ignorant of Egyptian mythology). Quinine believes that the arbitration of the Ibis-headed Thoth forms the synthesis, to the thesis of Seth and the antithesis of Horus. As he struggles to make this wooden trichotomy explicit, he loses track of time, and loses track of Kolya, who has in recent days become obsessed with the movement of articulated lorries. Mrs. Feather shakes her head when she finds the infant genius toddling along behind a Waitrose lorry which is inching forward through a traffic jam.