People, or persons thereof #18

Sandra McGivenchy-Vestibule has spent the last six years in the science wilderness following her public announcement to devote her life to solemn remembrance of the world’s forgotten cheeses. Prior to her erratic televised outing, she commanded the respect of fellow scientists and real people in several continents as a result of devising the definitive number of anagrams of the word ‘sputum’.
She married young (some say perhaps too young - some question if she should have married at all) and left her home in Hokie Town, Alberta with her partially disabled husband Jeff van der Filderbarnns to seek new fortunes. Whilst earning her rent working for a rogue Salvation Army splinter group known (even today) simply as 3.1#, she also attended weekly evening courses at the Academy of the Lesser Sciences and Home Economics, where she eventually graduated due to a technicality. Armed with her new degree, it didn’t take Sandra long to approach a company where she got a job doing something. Then she did some science stuff and became a scientist and world famous.

She had it all: the trappings of adulation from scores of mentally handicapped lab assistants (some barely alive!); the weekend trips to Hull; the membership loyalty cards to Primark and the coveted Flannel Producers Prize of Distinction for Doing Stuff whilst Sober (with Flannel, or Flannel-derived Products).
While most people could only dream of such dizzying heights of achievement, Sandra did not balk at the opportunity to use her fame for good causes. During a postgrad fellowship trip to the Isle of Skye (to study the relationship between oxygen and other stuff), she endeared herself to a band of freemasons intent on preserving (and if at all possible, cataloguing) the world’s dying cheeses. Sandra there and then decided she had found her calling.
Twenty years later she made the by now infamous speech on Granada Television’s fondly remembered programme ‘And so it was that this happened sometime in the last five or six days’. Perhaps the repercussions of her strong views took her by surprise, perhaps not. No one cares. But her life was never the same, and with her demise she left a great, gaping (and somewhat smelly) hole in fringe science; a hole that may never (nor should it) be filled.
Sandra currently lives in Prestwick where she runs a 16th century mill with her second husband, the aptly named parakeet Wilson.