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For The Emigre

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For Perspective

Born in 1926, into Anglo-Welsh upper-middle comfort, James Humphry Morris was educated at Christ Church, Lancing, and Christ Church again, served in the dashing 9^th Queen’s Royal Lancers during WWII, climbed much of Everest and broke the news of Hillary and Tenzing’s successful 1953 ascent, uncovered Franco-Israeli collusion at Suez, and reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Not interested in public life, or really any steady form of employment, he became one of Britain’s greatest writers (of travel, journalism, history, and eventually a novel). And then, in 1972, he went to Morocco, emerging from the Casablanca surgery as ‘Jan’. Conundrum was published only two years later (the first under Morris’s new name), reissued several times, and subsequently hailed as one of the ‘100 Key Books of Our Time’.

In a memoir that’s somehow barely five hours long, she relates the realisation, aged three (under the piano), that she’d been born into the wrong body; summarises the long human fascination with (and indulgence of) the blurry boundaries of sex and gender; mentions suicide as almost a purely-factual alternative; and is disarmingly frank about her sexual reaction to architecture, being kissed by a cabbie, becoming her wife’s ‘sister-in-law’, and a hundred and one other extraordinary situations.

‘Few people understood it’, Morris admits (the Olympics gets a mention, NB), and she’s at pains to note those whose lives have been wrecked by such decisions. But by and large she says she had quite positive reactions. It’s hard not to suspect these findings must be cushioned by class and other kinds of self-sufficiency. A born free-thinker (though not a mere contrarian), it’s fairly clear that Morris keenly maintained, on several levels, her outsider status… and also that she could afford to.

During her lifetime, transsexualism has gone, practically speaking, from ‘virtual inconceivable’ to ‘nearly a commonplace’, and today’s gender activists will no doubt have views on her attitude towards the ‘trendy’ word ‘identity’, statements about the ‘androgenous condition’ disqualifying her from writing fiction, and views on men and women (‘I did not want to be good at reversing cars…’, e.g.) now – in her updated introduction – acknowledged as ‘preposterously obsolete’.

At her death last year, aged 94, Jan Morris had been a woman for more of her life than she was not. It took a while for me to twig Conundrum was read – quite unobtrusively, but still from start to finish – by a man.

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For Perspective magazine

— The Nelson Evening Mail, Monday, July 13 1908
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A gold coin celebrating the assassination of Julius Caesar has been auctioned for more than $3m dollars.

50% of a man’s hair is gone before it becomes noticeable.

Good socialists need not refuse a good cigar if it is offered them.

Sri Lanka has one of the highest suicide rates in the world.

The suspension of Jeremy Corbyn is a factional attack that has undermined the fight against antisemitism.

Esperanto was created by Doktoro Esperanto.

South Yorkshire Police Operations Complex is on Letsby Avenue.

A gun is 22 times more likely to be used on yourself or a family member than on a home invader.

Sweden has increased its military budget by 40%.

The Democrats are taking quite a lead all over.

Many Indians have arranged-cum-love marriages.

Oreo have built a doomsday vault to protect their cookies from an asteroid.

The boulder is the truth that great men know by instinct. The mountain is the stupidity of mankind.

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For the Sri Lankan Sunday Times

Really.

Truly: je t’adore.

But when I make our lunch,
I still put more cheese in my sandwich
than in yours.

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For Roar Media

— The Nelson Evening Mail, Tuesday, September 25 1906
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The Earl of Oxford did not write Fleabag.

Hull is other people.

Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci chose to stick the with most ridiculous crap name that they could think of.

Failure to yield causes one in five accidents in Ohio.

Justin Trudeau performs yoga.

The Incredible Hulk is better than Cúchulainn.

There are 67 million invented names on Facebook.

Silent and discreet masseuses do not exist in Russia.

Starfish taste very bitter.

The Rifle Volunteers are always ready – but not yet wanted.

The Space Bowl is again closed due to maintenance.

Leonardo da Vinci has a violin made from a horse’s skull, with silver on.

There seems no middle ground with borscht.

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

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For Queen Mob’s Tea House

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For Queen Mob’s Tea House