Protein Man:

Stanley Owen Green (22 February 1915–12 December 1993)

- BY MICHAEL PATRICK O'LEARY

This brought to my mind the man I used to see outside Oxford Street tube station trying to persuade people to give up protein. That man was was Stanley Green (1915-1993), often known as the "Protein Man" or "The Human Billboard".

I do not know if Stanley Green was consciously influenced by Pythagoras. Pythagoras, as well as being famous for telling us that, "The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides", avoided eating beans, especially Vicia faba, fava beans (my particular favourite). Aristotle, Diogenes, Iamblichus and Varro gave different explanations for their ban on beans. Diogenes was very averse to fava beans but was OK with masturbating in public and pissing on passers by. Go figure!

Did these ancient Greek philosophers avoid beans because they contained the souls of the dead? Is that why the late, great Hannibal Lecter put them on the menu when he had a friend for dinner? Some say that Pythagoreans thought fava beans resembled human flesh/genitalia/foetuses, or acted as gateways to the underworld.

Perhaps it was just the flatulence that gave beans a bad rep. A fart was interpreted as the release of a trapped soul. As James Joyce put it: "did an angel speak?"

Ubiquitous and Anonymous

Lynne Truss (fortunately for her, no relation to 44-day prime minister, Liz Truss) is an English author, journalist, novelist, radio broadcaster and dramatist. She champions correctness and aesthetics in the English language, which is the subject of her 2003 book, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. She described Stanley Green as "the most famous non-famous person in London". Green was a constant, recognizable fixture in everyday London life, seen in countless photos taken by people who did not know who he was.