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For The Emigre

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For The Critic

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For the Sri Lankan Sunday Times

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For The Critic

Well, a decade on, that situation’s only got worse. Karunatilaka and I are now related. Wife’s cousin’s cousins… we are fairly confident.

Betweentimes, Chinaman has gone from strength to strength. It won a raft of prizes (Gratiaen, Commonwealth, DSC South Asia), has been or is being translated into several languages (including Sinhala), and last year a Wisden panel voted it – a quite absurd achievement, this – the greatest novel and second-greatest cricket book of any kind of all time. The umpteenth printing is now out, via Penguin India, in a new ’10^th Anniversary’ special edition: hardly standard practice for even the most successful novels.

Nor has Karunatilaka been resting on his laurels. All jokes aside about the difficult second album/novel (he’d be quite happy with either, I suspect), he has already published one children’s book (Please Don’t Put That in Your Mouth) and written the follow-up; there is open talk of a short-story collection; and there is the somewhat unexpected matter of a forthcoming cookery book – a co-project with his wife.

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Chats with the Dead is the story of Maali Almeida, a 34-year-old photographer who ‘s good at ‘winning at blackjack, seducing young peasants, and photographing scary places.’ Or rather was – because he’s dead now.

It’s Sri Lanka, 1989, and Maali had been in bed, photographically-speaking, with a lot of the conflicting parties, not to mention their agendas. The JVP, the government, the BBC, a Tamil-rights group; he has been to the frontlines for all of them. To say he was ‘promiscuous’ would strike, well… exactly the right tone. And in a box he keeps of his disturbing/unpublishable outtakes, he even has a photo of his killer – ‘the chances of liberating [which] are as likely as Lanka winning a World Cup.’ He just can’t remember who it was yet: whereby, our detective story. ‘It is funny and unfunny what your brain chooses to retain.’

He had also been in bed, non-photographically-speaking, with, among others, his girlfriend Jaki and his boyfriend DD – a love triangle whose sides don’t meet (based loosely on the life of Richard de Zoysa). These two are also cousins, because, y’know, Colombo.

He now finds himself in some aspect of the afterlife – though quite which he is yet to fathom. It is a busy place (as Nietzsche once put it, the living are only a very small subset of the dead), and by and by he crosses paths with a dead lawyer, a dead bodyguard, two dead lovers… some helpful, others vengeful, a few competing for his soul, and most of them frustratedly trying to chat back with the living. So now he has to learn ‘the rules’, as well as solve the mystery of his murder.

It is the Mahavamsa meets The Matrix… in a Sri Lankan government department.

‘When you fantasized about heaven you thought you’d be greeted by Elvis or Oscar Wilde. Not by a dead doctor. Or a deceased Marxist.’ But by page 16 he’s met both, and is now watching his own corpse being incompetently disposed of by paramilitary goons, at Beira Lake. And while he talks thus, retrospectively, to himself (the whole thing’s in the second person), there swirls around him an all-comers spirit realm of fanged ghouls, minor deities, baby-stealers, charms, seances, sorcery, urban legends, prayers, dreams and talking animals, an inventive theological mix of everything from Kuveni’s curse to the Kotahena Crow Man in his urban underpass.

There exists already a Karunatilaka style, and it is here in spades: dive bars, Colombo culture, books, art and (particularly) music, the things that are – and are not – talked about. His taunting games with names and places. A cheeky drop-in from the boys in Chinaman. A page-long parody of Anil’s Ghost? And then the storyteller’s signs deployed by every shifty author from Herodotus to Ondaatje – ‘All stories are recycled, and all stories are unfair’ – the whole lot strung together with the now-familiar mischievous logic, verbal levity and seamy humour that mark him out as the Sri Lankan counterpart to Marlon James.

As with James, this doesn’t always make for pleasant reading (consider Maali’s job); but then his thoughts on all those easier alternatives might well be coded in the line, ‘Monsoons and full moons make all creatures stupid.’

Chats with the Dead is considerably more direct in its satire than was its predecessor. Besides, the stakes are higher. The abject slavery of many lives; the rank iniquities of much religion; the dreadful suicide rate. And as he picks at these scabs of SL’s less-than-savoury history, Maali’s most unflattering (and generally unchallenged) remarks are reserved for the nature of the post-Independence nation: as a corrupted paradise, on its political class, and on its tendencies to violence. ‘Yakas are made, not born,’ someone admonishes. It’s not conciliatory, nor is it all that optimistic. Karunatilaka – I mean, Maali… – has a savagely critical reading of the self-conscious national lust for a rapacious origin.

Reflecting on the spurious léonine self-image of his countrymen, Maali reflects that ‘If we must have a national creature, if it must be on our flags, in our myths, and painted on our sports teams, why must it be the clichéd lion? If we must have an animal as a national symbol, let it be something original that we can own.’

‘Like many Sri Lankans,’ he goes on, ‘pangolins…’ – but I shan’t spoil it for you. Needless to say, the month or so since Chats‘s launch has seen you-couldn’t-make-it-up links form between the pangolin, Sri Lanka, and the realms of death and afterlife.

Chats is an entirely successful and perfectly mature novel, as good as – albeit much darker and less full of, well… life than – Chinaman. But it’s not perfect. Too many variants of ‘Maali’, ‘malli’, ‘Maal’, ‘Malin’, and so on for the untrained eye/ear; some minor characters who might be given clearer edges (or got rid of/merged); some textual messiness; an anachronism or two; a couple of vague inconsistencies, and one hell of what seemed like a twist (read literally) just pages from the end, but which turned out to be two sentences in need of much more careful separation. A lot, frankly, that ought to have been dealt with by professional wordsmiths at a world-bestriding publishing colossus.

But the bigger problem, I fear, will be one of international ‘accessibility’. In my review of Chinaman I noted that I thought the quite heavy preponderance of little-known Sri Lankan terms and Singlish might have the effect of denting saleability. The international success of that book would suggest that I was wrong – or that assiduous changes were made during the foreign publication process.

The same applies here. Minor matters of vocab or narrowly-regional reference (there is a sharp remark about the vulnerability of shop signs ‘that end in consonants’, e.g.) can of course be edited; but in the case of Chats, the hardwired very-Lankan-ness – the ’80s politics, the social concepts and the mytho-religious lexicon: the meat and bone of the matter (if one can use that term for ghosts) – is perhaps much more pervasive than the first-round local reader might imagine. Sri Lankans may enjoy the novel (doubtless the wrong word) for a certain grim nostalgia quotient; but all but very-interested foreign readers may find that there is rather a lot ‘going on’.

So much for second novels, difficult or otherwise. In literature, as in all else, people are ingrates – so it’s quite likely this will not be greeted with the fanfare that met Chinaman. For better or worse, Chats with the Dead is a novel by a multi-award-winning author, which will be judged on more than its own merits, and/or held to a higher standard.

More locally, the book may yet prove to have landed in a timely fashion. In these increasingly apocalyptic times, let us hope Maali Almeida is wrong when he warns: ‘Do not be afraid of ghosts, it is the living we should fear.’

—
For the Sri Lankan Sunday Times

difficult second child

difficult second trimester

difficult second album syndrome

difficult second pregnancy

Only Connect: The Difficult Second Quiz Book, by Jack Waley-Cohen

difficult second interview questions

difficult second baby

difficult second coming

difficult second novel
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Why, I asked some months back, in these pages, do the protagonists in American fiction these days seem so lost? What is it they’re all so het up about?

Well… everything. At least according to the narrator of Ducks, Newburyport.

Lucy Ellmann’s monster novel is a more or less non-stop narration of the thoughts of one Ohio housewife, a former college teacher who now bakes pies for money, attempts to keep her household shipshape, feels the pinch of post-bail-out America, is frustrated in the usual ways, and frets persistently about the physical, moral and emotional safety of her offspring (other people’s too) in those ostensibly United States.

Song lyrics, boarlets, clickbait headlines, bits of her children’s homework, first world problems, Schubert, shopping, getting cancer, the Amish, things she’s forgotten, assassinated presidents, FOOSH injuries, actors’ names, wordplays, her mother’s death, Revere Ware pots (me either), the life and works of Laura Ingalls Wilder, styptic sticks, lines from Shakespeare, fake-brick wallpaper, captions for YouTube videos, her husband’s fear of bridge-collapses, her own Mid-West gosh-darn-it lexicon, the plots of classic movies, ‘Indian’ burial mounds, lists of places/diseases/brandnames/pies (Umberto Eco would have very much approved)…

All human – at least, All-American – life is here. And death too, obvs. There are, in case you hadn’t heard, a lot of shootings.

At random, from page 52: ‘Miss America, misanthropy, missed opportunity’ … ‘willy-nilly, folkloric, the fact that a female police officer led a double life for nine years, Horror Movie Hotel’ … ‘the fact that it’s not just my outfits that bug Stace though, the fact that it’s everything I do, or don’t do, the fact that, boy, she keeps a beady eye on me…’

These ‘facts’, the hooks for her seemingly ever-expanding tapestry: ‘the fact that anyway I think you can overdo remembering stuff’, ‘the fact that everybody’s got a gun now’, ‘the fact that it begins to seem positively unAmerican to internalize things’, ‘the fact that Philip Glass can get a little bit repetitive’, ‘the fact that I think there’s maybe too much emphasis on facts these days, or maybe there are just too many facts’.

So by ‘everything’ I really do mean everything. Through all these facts, distracts, and (mis)rememberings (there is an iffy G&S line somewhere), our unnamed Everywoman becomes a living, breathing information overload, perhaps the most intensely real depiction of the life of the quotidian mind I’ve ever witnessed.

And while ‘neurotic’ might be overstating it, this is a woman who is worrying 24/7, across the entire imaginable gamut (she worries about that too), rising to quite alarming levels of morbidity, especially – and you can rather see this coming – with regards to violence against women, mothers and/or children in every corner of the faunal kingdom. Intermingled with her own glacial release of biographic data (what one might otherwise be calling ‘narrative’), there appear sporadic scenes from the unfolding story of a mountain lioness and her cubs – which come to bear.

In all, in its assessment of the Big Contemporary American Themes of violence, headline news and environmentalism, what Ducks… amounts to is one great trauma diagnosis for the entire country: ‘the fact that people are always saying this isn’t “who we are as a nation,” but, well, it kind of is.’ The book was published, with mordant wit, on July 4th.

Unless you too are a nervous, baking-enthusiast Ohio housewife it’s fair to say your sympathy will wax and wane a little as the book goes on; but Ellmann’s Joycean achievement is to drag you along, complicitly, in her endurance marathon of anxiety and trivia – not least, of course, because you’ve no idea what might or might not turn out to be trivia (‘ducks, Newburyport’).

It’s a colossal feat. And if you didn’t exactly see it cluttering the Beach Reads lists this summer – it may yet be more read about than read – it’s now been shortlisted for the Booker Prize (announced next month), and frankly that’s no less than it deserves.

—
For The Spectator

Certain American States
by Catherine Lacey
Granta, £12.99, pp.190

Hostages
by Oisín Fagan
Head of Zeus, £8.99, pp.269

Notes from the Fog
by Ben Marcus
Granta, £12.99, pp.266

The Abyss and Other Stories
by Leonid Andreyev
Alma Books, £8.99, pp.315

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Only Helen DeWitt would start a book with an epigraph of her own pop-culture mash-up poetry and end with an appeal to buy the writer coffee.

Author of just two previous published novels (about a multilingual child prodigy, and an encyclopaedia salesman turned sex-peddler, respectively), DeWitt keeps a pure flame, and doesn’t want to hear why others won’t.

She and her characters inhabit an intellectual, emotional, and physical triangle between New York, Berlin, and Gloucester Green bus station, Oxford. ‘It would mean a lot to me to work with [an editor] who admired Bertrand Russell,’ one of her narrators remarks… about her children’s book. Another one has ‘views on the Kaddish of Mr Leon Wieseltier’. And DeWitt’s endnotes (indeed) reference the cost of pigments in Renaissance painting, the clever-clever comics website xkcd, and a proof (non sic) found in another of her own unpublished novels, on the distinction between X and x.

Some Trick‘s abiding theme is thwarted genius – especially where that genius is female. The art world features heavily, as does the relationship between being an artist and, say, being able to feed oneself. Ditto publishing, of course, and the rest of her preoccupying passions: music, languages (she speaks or reads about a dozen), maths (stats, specifically), and, perhaps inevitably, computer programming.

In a story full of distribution graphs, a typical DeWitt sentence runs: ‘Peter had written a book of robot tales with a happy beginning which had made, as it turned out, what seemed a lot of money, and yet not enough money to mitigate contractual relations with persons who had professed to love it yet sought to remove references to e^i?.’ Beneath this is a four-paragraph-long note, rolled over from the previous page, on information design.

And yet it’s all perversely readable, and entertaining. Some trick.

Catherine Lacey’s first protagonist is an ex-husband knocked for six by a short story his ex-wife just published. Another woman clears out her dead husband’s closet. A narrator cares for an unloving godfather. A businessman notes the letter firing him reads like a haiku. These Certain American States are, in the main, discomfiting and sad.

Lacey’s prose is free and full of pinpoint observations. There’s a type of shirt ‘meant to be borrowed from a man.’ WWJD? bracelets are a mug’s game, since Jesus had ‘supernatural powers… not the options the rest of us have.’ The great, flat, modern statement: ‘I wasn’t in the mood to be a person.’

But why is everyone so lost? The last thing any of these Americans are is ‘certain’. Most of them are frankly on the brink, adrift in a world where the ‘density and hue of their front lawn’ is the (admittedly brain-dead) measure of normality. One worries she’s ‘the only woman I know who swings hetero any more…. It feels unevolved.’ A second that she ‘can’t see how anything is organised.’ You can’t help wondering if they ‘feel’ too much. Is nobody at peace in that whole damn country?? To the stiff-lipped Brit, perhaps, there is a slight sowhatishness about the entire business.

Such airy ponderables do not intrude on Oisín Fagan’s Hostages.

His first long story (90 pages) is told from the perspective of a bomb. A riot breaks out in a ‘semi-rural, pre-suburban’ high school, a Lord of the Flies environment of scatalogical attacks, waterboarding and handjobs: ‘“Here lads… you can only do that for a couple of minutes, or he’ll die…”’ (the waterboarding, that is). Ahh, but ‘what is life but the promise of love?’ muses the bomb.

The other three big stories – of a plague of dead bodies, ‘Tanzanian’ diamond-mining, and a hyper-local tribal matriarchy – share this whiff of allegorical dystopian future-history, culminating in the 17-page ‘Costellos’ (my favourite), a single-paragraph, epic mock-tragedy, stretching from 1574 to 2144.

The end of the world is seemingly always just around the corner. But Hostages is funny and cheerful for all that (‘cross-eyed with sobriety’ ranks among my all-time favourite throwaway descriptions), and Fagan renders his DayGlo-Bruegelish nightmares in a careless, cliché-free Anglo-Irish (‘the quaintness of never having a pair of shoes’), with nods to South Park, Roy Keane, Alien, ‘Cotton Eye Joe’, and a general dose of that reflexive blackness that is the birthright of every proper Irishman. As queues form at the corpse-disposal sites, a speaker says ‘“I know the ladies’ committee who’ve worked with Tidy Towns before have had similar experiences…”’

Ben Marcus is often referred to as a genius. It says so right here on the cover, amid some other strong claims. But I am new to him – and Notes from the Fog may not have been the place to start.

In (yet another) vague, bleak, technologically-distorted near-future – as much unmagic as it is unreal – a young boy threatens his parents; couples argue; people get sick. The premises are interesting, the characters comprehensible, the dialogue good. Marcus has a talent for the barbs of domestic passive aggression and the terrible cruelty of children (one doesn’t ask…), and there are some tremendous branchlines for his trains of thought (terrorism as ‘a tax on comfort’, anybody?).

As with Lacey, though, it is what’s running through his characters’ minds that is the problem. Most of these people are – or should be – medicated. Some are actually the subjects of experiments; but they are all, as the Americans would say, ‘in their heads.’ And if Marcus’s relentlessly agitated prose (there are a lot of similes) is perfect for their truly epic levels of overthinking, ‘Wasn’t every bit of motion, anywhere, an invasion?’ Well, no. During a dangerous thunderstorm, ‘The road is kind of gross.’ Who thinks, or speaks, like that? Some child wears a teacher’s skin as his ‘shirt’. Except he doesn’t, obviously. It’s all just intellectual noodling, and page by page it comes to feel like writing aimed at other writers, neither unreadable nor brilliant, just rather pointlessly obtuse.

Amid all the linguistic and psychological pyrotechnics, one repeatedly finds oneself thinking ‘What is the actual story here?’ The storylines themselves appear to teeter on the verge of craziness, so otherworldly as to relieve the reader of any obligation to commit to them. Often as not, they just sink back into whatever mental (sic) landscape they loomed out of. Not particularly beginning, not really ending either. Perhaps this works in lit mags, individually; but in book form the cumulative result is frankly hard work.

As Marcus himself writes in ‘Critique'(!), ‘It amounts to a celebration of technique, suggesting a creator slightly too satisfied by method… as if the making of something mattered more than that thing’s purpose.’ Self-knowledge, maybe. But if this is genius, I don’t stand tall enough to see it.

Novelist, playwright, and gentleman revolutionary in the 1905 go-round, Leonid Andreyev was particularly infamous for his story ‘The Abyss’, in which a scholar and his sweetheart, out walking in the woods, exchanging poems, are set upon by a gang of drunken peasants (I’m not scared,” said Tolstoy, proto-bolshily).

The rest of this collection (some of it in English for the first time) is every bit as grim and Russian as the title number. A man with toothache goes to see the Crucifixion. A provincial official goes mad. A priest wants to convert to Islam. And almost everybody dies.

Andreyev’s tales may not be as contemporary as all these other authors’; there may be a ‘fateful inevitability’ for their protagonists; and one of them – the stories – may, in fact, have caused the First World War. But at least – like all things, good and bad – they end, is all I’m saying.

—
For the Spectator, in a shorter edit

I had invited an old friend, a raven-haired young lady (named in Debrett’s) of impossibly romantic tendency, who first exposed me to the film in, I’d say, about 1998 or ’99. It took a bit of selling, even then (and back then I thought I was Byron); but after not much more than a couple of minutes of the multi-Oscar-winner – about, to take just Michael Ondaatje’s main character, Count Ladislaus de Almásy, a pilot of dubious origin who is shot down in the Egyptian desert during the Second World War, knows the lines to every song he’s ever heard but not his own name, and may or may not have betrayed his colleagues to ze Chermans for the sake of love (we have no time for the true biography of László Almásy) – I was, of course, completely hooked.

Alexandra, alas, is unavailable (she works in theatre, natch), so I’ll be going with Harry – and as Harry’s guest, in fact. Harry and I were in Afghanistan together, in 2013, and, as he likes to say, I’ll never come to Dorset. (Don’t tell him: I’ve been several times, just not to visit him. He lives in Fulham, anyway.) But that film that Alex showed me has been with me for the better part of 20 years, now.

I applied to study Egyptology almost entirely on the strength of it, a fact I carefully concealed from cagey academic overseers at school and university. During my gap year in South Africa – just to be even more abysmally pretentious – I didn’t tuck things in a copy of Herodotus (‘the book he brought with him through the fire’), but in a Collected Works of Oscar Wilde. At Oxford I would walk around listening to the movie’s famously aching – nay, plangent – Gabriel Yared soundtrack on a loop (like all Ondaatje books, the original itself is in any case full of music and singing). In Canada I bought a black leather blazer-style jacket from Banana Republic, although I drew the line at knee-length khaki shorts.

In the libraries of the Oriental Institute I found odd books on modern Egypt (gasp!), or at least more-recent explorations of the desert, and began to make my own trips – though actually seeing Egypt, perhaps predictably, was not really a course requirement. And when I fell out with my college it was the lonely-hero movies like The English Patient I returned to in the bitter evenings. I became well-versed in the admissions criteria for the Foreign Legion. And then – under the signature of my professor – I joined the Royal Geographical Society, as found, thinly disguised, in the EP novel:

‘In the 1920s there is a sweet postscript history on this pocket of earth, made mostly by privately funded expeditions and followed by modest lectures given at the Geographical Society in London at Kensington Gore. These lectures are given by sunburned, exhausted men who, like Conrad’s sailors, are not too comfortable with the etiquette of taxis…’

The RGS – right next door to the RAH – has some nice old copies of Almásy things (not all in English), as well as material on the Long Range Desert Group (cf. the famous picture of bearded, hard-eyed SOE types in duffel coats, that used to do the rounds of my regimental HQ) and more scholarly desert-exploration articles by the likes of Bagnold, Bermann, Ball and Hassanein Bey, which Ondaatje sought out in back numbers of the Journal.

And in my then mood, the romantic, antisocial, somewhere-on-the-spectrum explorer and lover of the desert’s solitude, whose happiest memory, as he tells his (supposedly) illicit inamorata, Katharine Clifton, is the time he travelled all day with a guide who said nothing until he pointed at the horizon and said “Faya”… well, it struck a loud, if none-too-subtle, chord.

After a meeting once with Ranulph Fiennes (I followed him round the bookshops of Oxford, between signings, until he told me that in Oman he would have killed me by now), he put me in touch with John Hare, who had just completed a long camel-backed Saharan crossing, and whose brain I wanted to pick about doing one through the long crescent of oases in Egypt’s Western Desert. I never made that journey (yet). But a flame had obviously been kindled.

My first copy of the novel, came, entirely fittingly, from the American University in Cairo bookshop: a well-annotated, typo-strewn Picador paperback reprint, with the price (I think) on the title page in blue biro, bought on my first trip, in 2003, in the days immediately following the invasion of Iraq – an interesting time to be a tall, blond, white man in an Arab capital. (The receipt is still inside: it cost 45 Egyptian pounds.) I later gave in and bought myself a first edition, on Charing Cross Road, which I’ve not opened. No doubt I have a clingfilmed ‘deluxe’ version of the movie somewhere, also.

The book, of course, is total poetry (if there were ever any grounds for criticism it would be that there’s too much ‘poetry’). In a wonderful deleted scene, available on YouTube, an old bedou tells Almásy something, which he translates to Katharine: “He thinks he’s been there – but the route he’s describing, well, he couldn’t survive the journey now; but he’s a poet, so his map is poetry.”

I’ve ever since been an enthusiastic reader of Saul Kelly, Justin Marozzi, and other writers on Herodotus, the lost oasis of Zerzura, and the ‘real’ Almásy, all of which led to a friendship with the freewheeling, polymathic writer Robert Twigger, to interview whom I ‘crossed the Sinai’ (I was on a bus) in 2009. Rob now lives in Dorset (ssshhhh…!), and his most recent travel book – on the Himalayas, following on from one on the Nile – was Book of the Month in Geographical magazine, the magazine of the RGS. In a nicely complementary kind of way, I’ve just this week been asked to write my first piece for that magazine.

Eventually, the chance arose to go to my own desert war, and so I leapt at it. But that was years ago now, and unexciting – and I survived, unharmed, unlike (the fictional) Almásy.

I remain ‘a person who if left alone in someone’s home walks to the bookcase, pulls down a volume and inhales it.’ I still keep things I need in books (which means that I can never find them). I know both names for what that place is called, at the base of a woman’s neck. Beyond a weekend or two with HM Forces, I haven’t yet got round to learning Arabic, let alone Hungarian, or several of the other languages that Almásy spoke (my two brothers speak a little, though I bet they can’t describe a mountain that looks like the shape of a woman’s back); but I can name some of the winds Almásy/Ondaatje describes, and tell their stories. I often listen to the Yared soundtrack. In fact, Benny Goodman’s ‘Wang Wang Blues’ was one of the first things that I played my child when she was born. Nor can I give her (or anyone else) a bit of plum without informing them that it’s a ‘very plum… plum.’ We were in Brighton, the other week, at the aquarium, to celebrate her turning one, and I found myself humming Lorenz Hart’s original words to ‘Manhattan’, ‘before they were cleaned up.’

I’ve watched the film at least a dozen times, now, and read the novel maybe half a dozen. I’ve given copies of both DVD and book as gifts, and indeed the movie-script on one occasion. And despite the fact that I own several copies, it’s one of a number of books – among those by a small number of literary favourites, like Chatwin, Coetzee, Golding, Dyer, Sebald, Hitchens – that, if I see it in a charity shop, I feel I ought to rescue, simply because it’s wrong that it should be there.

A few years and/or rewatches back, I realised that the day the ‘ENGLISH(?)’ patient is introduced to us is, by the notebook of the interrogating officer, my birthday.

In July, The English Patient won the Mother of all Bookers (or whatever this go round was called). We all know books mean many things to many people, and can have major real-world repercussions, on personal and even national levels. But amid all the renewed plaudits for Ondaatje’s classic novel, and the obvious, widespread awareness that it’s a tale packed full of questionable characters, traumatised and very literally scarred by conflict, it suddenly occurred to me that, given a long-enough trajectory, and alongside several other factors, it seems entirely plausible The English Patient is the reason that I went to war.

What would Ondaatje think of that, I wonder? My guess is he’d probably be horrified.

— The Nelson Evening Mail, July 17 1908
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A transgender man has had a baby five years after having one as a woman.

Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the Crown Prince of Dubai, is known as ‘Fazza’.

‘Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer’ is an advertisement for Hitler or something. It says this under a picture of him.

Old corned-beef’s rusty armour spreads disease.

Nice things cost money.

1.5 people is the exact wrong number to do anything efficiently.

England batsman Alastair Cook has played in his 150th test match at the WACA.

Author Boris Starling’s career began aged eight, when he plagiarised a story from a Tintin novel.

Aristotle walked a lot.

John-Boy Walton’s first spouse was Almira Gonzales. They divorced in 1993.

A female spy was the last woman to be executed in Finland.

Homeopathy is based on the false claim of the benefit of super-diluted substances and the principle of ‘like cures like’. While it has been debunked by hundreds of studies, people still want to believe in magic cures.

Don’t forget, many West Malling shops are open today.
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