Cutler Phiney is our guide on a fantastical journey through time.
He's a soft-spoken man whose age is a bit tough to pin down, either through his birth certificate or by looking at his face. He looks like he might be in his early thirties, or maybe he is fifty-something and comes from tough stock that doesn't turn grey until their sixties. It's tough to nail him down.
If you meet him, as you may indeed do, and then should happen to see him again a week later, you cannot assume it has been a week for him as well. He may well have been around the world twice and gone for a year or perhaps it has been only an hour. It is best you introduce yourself again, as he may well find it hard to place you.
Phiney is a compassionate man, a much sought-after writer of historical fiction, and holds an audience enraptured whenever he speaks. Whether it is with a few elite leaders of industry at the prestigious Holborne Club, or a group of lads at the cricket pitch, while he is not quick to talk, when he does, every word counts.
His dress is a little strange, and his accent is hard to place. A Canadian born to British parents perhaps? Or is he a displaced Irishman raised in India? Either way his novels of historical times and places have a striking, yet hard to describe, sense of realism of which his readers are very fond.
He is good with his hands, and is reputed to have built a one-third-scale, traditional Viking boat to rival the Tønsberg ship on show at the Oslo Museum. He paints in a dark, glossy, dramatic style in an uncanny throwback to the renaissance. When encouraged to show his work he claims that it is out of fashion and really just for his own enjoyment.
The man is a bit of an enigma, a cherished acquaintance, and an all-round capital fellow. While many have read his novels, few have been privy to these stories about the man's extraordinary personal life.
Cutler Phiney pronounces his surname to rhyme with 'skinny.'