Well I just thought I would link to this, simply because it made me laugh a lot. Yes it is, that’s a perfectly good reason.

The situation Norm complains of – having to buy three kinds of cat food, two of which his cat doesn’t like and won’t eat, because the kind she does like suddenly comes in a variety pack with two others instead of on its own – is a classic, a pure, a definitional example of what Kingsley Amis so rightly called sod the public. There’s a lot of it in the UK. I’ve always noticed that. There’s too much obsequiousness and groveling for the customer over here, perhaps (except of course when there isn’t), but … Read the rest

Oh look. What fun. We’d noticed that the Amazon page for the Dictionary didn’t have a picture. But now it does. I clicked on the page in an idle moment (okay a lazy moment) to see, and idleness and laziness were rewarded, because there it was. So have a look. And no, that is not a portrait. Everyone I’ve shown the book to says in a surprised manner ‘But you don’t look like that.’ No, that’s true, I don’t. I don’t wear my hair in two bunches on the back upper corners of my head, for one thing. And everything else is different too. There is no resemblance. None. I don’t think the guy looks much like my … Read the rest

Remember the lists of life-altering books? Way back last month – out of sight out of mind? I thought I would link to another, because it has The Uses of Literacy, by Richard Hoggart. As good a reason as any.

So once I started a book-related subject I thought I might as well continue with this article by Mark Edmundson. It says one or two things that I often say to myself (sometimes with oaths, sometimes in a kind of whining sniveling croon).

Yet for many people, the process of socialization doesn’t quite work. The values they acquire from all the well-meaning authorities don’t fit them. And it is these people who often become obsessed readers. They don’t