— The Nelson Evening Mail, Tuesday, December 22 1908
.

The SAS have killed some people in Afghanistan.

The Veneziana pizza was invented in the 1970s by Pizza Express.

In China, there’s a Monastery of Sin.

The first artificial Christmas tree wasn’t a tree at all.

Sir Isaac Newton was the last of the magicians.

The half-cock is a purely defensive stroke.

Greed was the cause of Colombo and indolence was that of Star Fort.

The word ‘robot’ is derived from the Russian for ‘to work’.

Wolves are a bit scarier than reindeers.

The average Dutchman is 6’1″.

Every child finds their father’s sneezes loud.

There are about half a dozen booksellers’ shops in Sydney.

A basic awareness of the humanities could make one a little less offensive.
.

.
When JS Mill was born, his father, James, challenged a friend to ‘race with you in the education of… the most accomplished and virtuous young man.’ That other child has not gone down in history – but he may well have dodged a serious bullet.

Learning Greek at 3, writing a history of Rome at 6, and tutoring his own siblings from the age of 8, Mill’s childhood became synonymous with intellectual hothouse upbringings.

Groomed to be the strict Utilitarian offspring of his father and Jeremy ‘greatest happiness’ Bentham (Mill’s mother, Harriet, goes resoundingly unmentioned in his Autobiography), he was prevented from associating with kids his own age, permanently off-games, and woken up at 5am to work unpaid on James’s History of British India. If mistakes were made, he got no lunch.

Some of his father’s peers expressed concern – while those merely impressed were kept away from him in case he got a big head. Mill was occasionally allowed such treats as Don Quixote, or Joyce’s Scientific Dialogues; but reading poetry was banned, despite the fact the family had once lived in John Milton’s cottage.

At 14 he took a gap year (as well one might), which he spent hobnobbing with French politicians, and taking university courses in chemistry, zoology, and higher maths. (It was noted, though, he could not comb his hair or tie a tie.) Back in England, he was arrested for distributing frank family-planning literature in poorer areas, and by the age of 20 he had nothing left to do but have his mid-life crisis.

In the circumstances, it is amazing that Mill turned out not merely functional but, in the assessment of one recent biographer, ‘the greatest public intellectual in the history of Britain – and perhaps even the world.’

With the help of Wordsworth’s poetry (indeed), he began to distance himself from the Utilitarians, deciding he should worry less about ‘the greatest happiness’ in the doctrinal sense and more about his – and others’ – personal freedom and bog-standard contentment.

Already educated beyond university, and almost employability, Mill purposely took an untaxing clerical job with the East India Company (he finished work round 1pm), and embarked on the enormous side-career of earnest political journalism that would make his name: or, in Edward ‘Clerihew’ Bentley’s wry summary, ‘By a mighty effort of will, / Overcame his natural bonhomie / And wrote Principles of Political Economy‘.

A unembarrassed ‘elitist democrat’, Mill believed that people could and should govern themselves, in the interests both of personal choice and broader social improvement, free from the tyrannies of law or majoritarian social attitudes – but that The People needed education and constraint. His faith in parliamentary democracy was not unqualified.

Individuals should be free to act as they wished, unless it would cause harm to others. ‘Offence’, NB, did not count as ‘harm’. In fact free speech was critical, for airing of minority opinions and for bringing questionable views into contact with better ones.

As an indication of the currency of these and other high-minded attitudes, when he was 31 The Spectator included Mill in a fantasy (sic) radical cabinet, though he was not even a politician.

Politically and personally, he was probably a hard man to be friends with. He viewed Coleridge as a poetic hero, but also an ‘arrant driveller’ on economic matters. Macaulay he called a ‘dwarf’, and Carlyle a ‘true voice for the Devil’ – an amity not defrosted by his maid using the only copy of Carlyle’s French Rev vol.1 to light the fire (cf. Blackadder).

He found eccentricity preferable to uniformity and stagnation, and his fallings out with former allies were almost always over their perceived political inflexibility. He had a marked penchant for killing heroes, including, famously, Bentham himself.

Pensioned off after the East India Company’s disbandment, Mill was finally at liberty to put his money where his professional mouth had been for over 40 years. In 1865 the titanic philosopher became a Liberal MP, by the unusual expedient of admitting at the hustings that he had called his working class would-be constituents ‘habitual liars’ (much cheering).

In a typically idiosyncratic and principled career, he prophesied the environmental dangers of unchecked economic development, but referred to the abolition of the death penalty as ‘effeminacy’; he continued to argue against the ‘tyranny of the majority’ in domestic politics, but was at peace with ‘despotism’ (his word) when it came to British rule in, e.g., India; he suggested learned folks should have more votes than the uneducated, but was the first man to bring a parliamentary vote on women’s suffrage.

He was, perhaps surprisingly, willing to compromise in the name of practical governance; but interested neither in party politics nor in ministerial advancement, he used the Commons as a pulpit to speak on as-yet-hopelessly-unpopular progressive issues. Having wound up Conservatives and Liberals alike, he lost his seat just three years later.

In 1851 he’d married Harriet (NB) Taylor, with whom he had been spending considerable time – ‘platonically’ – for decades, notwithstanding, and sometimes in, the presence of her husband (alive and, well, unstimulating). Alas for Mill, she died in 1858, but such was the impact, both morally and intellectually, of ‘the most admirable person I had ever known,’ that he dedicated much of the final phase of his life to the National Society for Women’s Suffrage, recruiting Florence Nightingale (originally sceptical) and being hailed by Millicent Fawcett as the ‘principal originator of the women’s movement.’

And so, while Bentham sat in state in his ‘auto-icon’ pickle-jar at UCL, Mill died an outsider, thrown out of one last club just months before his death, for his outspoken views on land redistribution.

Despite Monty Python‘s slanderous assertion that Mill became particularly ill on half a pint of shandy, it was actually a skin disorder what got him: erysipelas, or ‘holy fire’ (fittingly or otherwise, for an avowed agnostic in the former papal state of Avignon). He went to his grave believing his life had been ‘uneventful’, leaving one stepdaughter, Helen, and one godson (surely not the mot juste), Bertrand Russell.

—
For (the prototype edition of) Smith magazine

— The Nelson Evening Mail, Thursday, July 19 1906
.

Jacob Zuma is the only black South African president never to lift the rugby world cup.

At Morrisons, your opinion gets rewarded with a £500 voucher.

Vegetarianism, which is based on false hypotheses and ideas, does not have followers in the Soviet Union.

Property blinds all eyes.

You must be prepared to stabilise if you need to excavate earth.

Apples don’t have daddies.

Only humans know that trees are beautiful.

Yudhanjaya Wijeratne is appearing at the CENS Workshop on Understanding and Countering Online Falsehoods and Influence Operations.

Necessity, Manitoba, has a population of 1,230 souls.

Almost everyone is happy to accept the cookies.

The lion-keepers at Dublin Zoo have a remarkable record in breeding lion cubs.

Gustav Mahler wrote the Kindertotenlieder before any of his own children died.

Basketball is not an interesting sport.
.

p15
febrew-
wery

p20
rub–
brickredd

p34a
as a pious

p34b
ing the intimate nature of this, a first offence in vert or venison
which was admittedly an incautious but, at its wildest, a partial ex-
ing the intimate nature of this, a first offence in vert or venison

p37
ildiot repeated

p45
………..[Balbaccio, balbuccio!]  Italics

p66
New paragraph  a pillarbox? [The……………………….

p72
Alocutionist, Deposed,

p74
Italics  [Animadiabolum, mene credidisti mortuum?]………

p78
Italics  [(hypnos……………
chilia eonion!)]

p79
feeding

p82a
laying all

p82b
all aside, laying

p93
as would turn

p96a
Armoury … Sir Rumoury

p96b
of the peace

p101
knows

p116
gentleman is(?).

p135
and his burialplot

p174
82 bis

p176
Holy Baba And the Forty Thieves
Prisson your Pritchards and Play Withers Team

p224a
thinker‘s

p224b
guardian

p229a
……..[Nom de  Italics
plume!]

p229b
leave. Had Days. Nemo

  p251
Italics  [in omnibus moribus et temporibus]…….

p256
owreglias

p261 n4
Bhing, said the her burglar’s head, soto poce.

p262 n1
Yussive

p266 nl
Bet you fippence,
anythesious,
there’s no pug-
gatory

p269
………[haec genua Omnia]  Italics

p271
……….[nolens volens]  Italics

p272 n1
that, ma’am?

p278 n3
Essastessa

p282 n2
Lawdy Dawdy Simpers 

p285 n2
Barneycaorroall, a precedent for the prodection of curiosituy from children.

p338
No paragraph  ]Germanon.………………..

p340
unsheathing

p346
muckinsltushes

p367
Indent  [Till the Juke done it.…………..

p399
host

p418
Ordinary type  [The thing pleased him andt, and andt, [and ff.]…………
No paragraph……………………………………………………………………
Indent…………………………………………………………..

p427
from orw 

p443
hebdomedaries

p494
— The giant sun

p496
Italics  [Auxilium Meum Solo A Domino]……..

p547
— This time a hundred years!
No gap
— But I was firm with her.

p567
bigbagbone

p594
Bra-
Brathwacker

p617
correctly[]informed
. 

— The Nelson Evening Mail, Thursday, March 14 1907
.

Los Angeles is a lousy, boring little town. A European could die there from boredom.

January ain’t about the blues.

Piers Morgan is sick.

The veins of Englishmen flow with rainwater.

In a land with no fathers you get Chernobyl and Sellafield.

Andy Murray is a quilter.

A fast herd of deer is nothing more than a herd of fast deer.

It is illegal to take more than 5000 rupees into Sri Lanka.

Benedict Cumberbatch has personally caused Brexit.

Twentieth-century Western philosophy has forgotten air.

All shoplifters risk arrest.

No wine can be considered as unimportant since the marriage at Cana.

Dominic Hilton came out to his family at age 14, worked as a male escort well into his twenties, and engaged in homosexual acts with over 150 men. He now likes women.

Not the C17th religious nonconformists. Folk who can’t shut up about things.

You know the type. The workplace philosophers; the shouters at the TV; people in whose eyes you see the glint of socialist dictatorship.

They come in every walk of life. Stupid boxers (*tautology klaxon*), old men in pubs, Daily Mail columnists, every comedian who ever hosted an awards night, back-bench Labour MPs, the current president (plus phone) of the United States, Basil F***ing Fawlty.

It’s the humourlessness that really does for them. The veering crazily from ‘point’ to ‘point’. “Do you know what I mean?” they’re always asking. Alas, we always do.

Of course, a lot of ranters are successful enough to get away with it.

Doctor Johnson, one suspects, was probably a dreadful ranter. John McEnroe, obviously. Jeremy Clarkson. Will Self. Naomi Campbell. Mel Gibson. Sir Alex Ferguson was given a knighthood for services to ranting. And then there’s Geoffrey Boycott.

For every Charlie Sheen, mind, there is a Michael Richards.

Still, famous people we can usually switch off. Everyday ranters, though – real live people, whom you might find yourself stuck in a lift with – well, they’re entirely unspeakable. A quite close friend of mine goes apoplectic if he sees a button out of place in military dramas. I’ve had to institute a swear-jar system.

It’s just not really British, is it? (“I’ll rant as well at thou,” quoth Hamlet. But he was from Denmark.) Our all-time-favourite ranting stories end in tumbleweed, embarrassment, and Downfall bunker parodies on YouTube.

Another friend’s somewhat brigadierial granddad once had a long and testy conversation with (e.g.) the British Rail Customer Services Hotline, concluding, “I mean, for God’s sake, man, this is Britain, not bloody Bangalore!?’ The plaintive and predictable reply: “No sir: this is Bangalore.”

As any Oldie worth his salt will vouch, life’s too short, one mustn’t grumble, and almost nothing’s that important, really. My father – curse him – has a good line when he thinks I’m getting exercised o’er trivia: “Is this going to form a chapter in your memoirs?” That tends to do the trick.

—
For The Oldie

— but kept a separate chopping board for onions.