My first toast - Watson's Tin Box meeting for April 2024

The Watson's Tin Box of Ellicott City, Maryland met on Monday night, April 15 2024. The story up for discussion at the meeting was The Adventure of the Yellow Face. 

Each Tin Box meeting includes a presentation by a member. The highlight of the evening was a wonderful presentation by Olivia Millunzi who gave a stunning and detailed presentation identifying the times and places of events in The Yellow Face, and even identified which yellow fever epidemic was responsible for killing John Hebron! To do all this Olivia used her knowledge of American records, newspapers and genealogy records to systematically nail down the details of the Georgia backstory. I'm very much looking forward to seeing Olivia write this up for publication.... somewhere! I think it should be in BSJ - it was the best Sherlockian research presentation I've seen in a while.

The other item I wanted to post was my toast to "The Woman". This is the first time I've written an original toast (I've given one or two others at meetings, but used a simple "To The Woman", or used a toast (with credit) from the excellent Sherlock Toast Database run by Ross Davies (http://www.rossdavies.org/toasts). But this is my first toast, and I've submitted it to the database!

To Watson, Mary Morstan may have been "the woman"

But, it turns out there were quite a few "the woman"s over time...

and across the globe.

Do we toast each of Watson's "the woman" ?

We don't have that much brandy!

So let us turn to one that does not risk multitudes of toasts.

To the King of Bohemia she was "the well-known adventuress".

To Sherlock Holmes "she is always the woman".

That woman was the "late Irene Adler".

"With a face that a man might die for"

As Sherlock taught us, “When a woman thinks that her house is on fire, her instinct is at once to rush to the thing which she values most. A married woman grabs at her baby; an unmarried one reaches for her jewel-box."

And as Sherlockians we would of course grab for our drinks. Let us do so, and toast.... "The Woman" !!