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For The Critic

— The Nelson Evening Mail, Monday, January 21 1907
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Samuel John Taylor Coleridge is the first descendant in more than two centuries to be named after his great-great-great-great-great-uncle the poet.

The Oxford prison is a boutique hotel.

There are no bears at London Zoo.

Native Americans do not care about the name of the Washington Redskins.

If the king laugh, all laugh.

Laser hair removal in Maradana might be cheaper than you think.

Pasternak means ‘parsnip’ in Russian.

Everything is rare somewhere.

Laurie Lee did not drink cider.

Map-makers include mistakes in their work to see if anyone is copying them.

25% of all Welsh males are related to the Welsh nobility.

Richard Branson eats his dinner in 45 minutes.

It takes nothing to cook up a thoroughgoing libel.
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—
For the Sri Lankan Sunday Times

—
For The Critic

— The Nelson Evening Mail, Wednesday, April 10 1907
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There are 2000 non-functioning satellites in space.

Lord Reith did not want people to enjoy the radio.

New species are discovered every week in jungles.

Friday night is lobster night.

Church people are just shitty to each other.

Aethelred the Unready was merely ill-advised.

Ceylons are usually more mellow in character than Indians.

Townspeople in Kyoto gather to stare at severed heads.

The start of Yr12 is twenty times harder than people think it will be.

A PhD could be done on the word ‘cruxway’.

The Panama Canal runs North to South.

It costs $17,500US to outfit one American soldier.

There’s nothing necessarily reassuring about the order of things.

— The Nelson Evening Mail, January 18 1907
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Women leaders are more volatile than men.

The cause of alcoholism is unknown.

They’re selling hippy wigs in Woolworths.

In Togoloese, ‘fofo’ means ‘revered big brother’.

White people, lacking community, must make do with property.

If extortionate fares are demanded, as they often are, the Ceylonese rickshaw driver should be asked to produce the fare table, which he is bound to carry; though no one is likely, if well served, to object to an advance, by way of a pourboire, on the strictly legal fare.

Elvis Presley’s last words were: “I’m going to the bathroom to read.”

Nicodemus the sleepwalker is on his way.

The Devil claims the tenth scholar as his due.

In 1928 the Tate Gallery was drenched in mud.

A destitute is someone who will have sex for money.

It is unsafe to have one foot in the world of social media.

There are no heroes without wounds.
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— The Nelson Evening Mail, March 14 1907
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The persecution of Christians is now worse than at any time in history.

Toto’s ‘Africa’ is one of Myleene Klass’s all-time favourites.

The Hillsborough disaster is still in the news.

Simon Bolivar, a Venezuelan military and political leader, liberated Colombia.

The quern performs best when the grindstone has been pitted.

Not everything in life is a $20 jerk-job.

In the ten years of the ‘Cultural Revolution’, the Chinese population increased by 200 million.

Kevin Spacey has always been gay.

Quite a few forests have no trees to speak of.

Orlando is a thoroughly disconnected short novel by the famously unreadable and wildly overrated Virginia Woolf, whose long-suffering husband was a colonial civil servant in Ceylon.

The odds on a white Christmas have been slashed to 2/1.

Nobody ever sits in a badly-lit cellar holding the day’s newspaper for a camera without feeling fear.

Legoland Windsor is full.
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