Richard III has cast his spell on my New Mexico cabbie "Ya bin to Middle-HAM Castle?" demanded my burly driver. Boy! Some pile! Musta really bin somethin" back in the day! Biked all over York-SHIRE when I was a student back East! I repositioned my jaw and replied that I did indeed know Middleham, that hauntingly beautiful Wensleydale pile. He shifted into top gear on medieval English history. I majored in English and after reading that play, Richard III and those Roses Wars...and then I saw that great Olivier movie and read lotsa other stuff... Watching his bearded face in the mirror I could have sworn his eyes grew misty with nostalgia. He waved a meaty hand on which gauntlets could have been a weapon of mass destruction. Luckily, like him, I had read Josephine Tey's classic whodunit, Daughter of Time (l95l). If I'd had to admit that I had not I would probably have been dumped out on a sidewalk shimmering with heat. For the rest of the journey we shuttlecocked snippets, pro and con, about the long-ago battles which ended at Bosworth Field in the summer of l485 and the English crown being placed above the hatchet face of Henry Tudor. There seemed absolutely nothing about that defining period in English history that my "Professor Cabbie" didn't know. Had he been brought in as a visiting lecturer he could have kept my university students on the edge of their seats. He had even read the respected tomes of Professor Charles Ross, noted historian though no fan of Richard... and knew that Ross himself had been murdered in his Bristol University office in l986. This turned out to be one taxi trip that ended far too soon and, sadly, has never been repeated since my recalcitrant Dodge wheezed back to life. I would certainly give much to hear my historian-cabbie's take on the very latest Richard III discovery in tha t Leicester car park on the Greyfriars site. Waving that huge hand designed for a gauntlet and a swinging mace what would he have said about the skeleton with one shoulder seemingly higher than the other, caused by scoliosis, say the scholars, not the hump of legend. According to my Telegraph Weekly World Edition for September l9-24, 20l2, DNA testing was being undertaken. Perhaps now the results are known and it has been confirmed the skeleton is indeed the king, I should call the taxi company and ask if their resident medieval Plantagenet scholar can run me into town. And if we meet again I must remember to tell him that The Telegraph for March 7-l3, 2007, ran an obituary for Mrs Dorothy Mitchell, 80, who founded the Society of Friends of Richard III, which still flourishes and celebrates Richard's October birthday with a newsletter. It should also be noted that famous fans of Richard were Rex Stout, author of the Nero Wolfe mysteries, James Thurber, and, as my Ricardian aficionado south-western desert cabbie surely knew... Salvador Dali! No wonder Richard III looks so enigmatic in his famous portrait by an unknown artist, which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, as he thoughtfully slides a ring and seems to look across the centuries to a bizarre link to a young outlaw and a most unusual cab driver!