I came across two lists recently, which caught my attention. The first was a list of insults. Winston Churchill was a master of insults. Apparently George Bernard Shaw wrote to Churchill saying “I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend, if you have one.” Churchill replied: “Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second… if there is one.” I can’t imagine what sparked the altercation. Shaw wrote one of my favourite plays, You Never Can Tell. Another good insult is by Billy Wilder: “He has Van Gogh’s ear for music.” I don’t know who the recipient was. I’ll let Abraham Lincoln have the last word on insults: “He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know.”
The second list was brought to my attention in the April edition of Red Herrings. It is a list of unusual ways of dying. Aeschylus, the father of Greek tragedy was killed when an eagle dropped a turtle on his head, presumably mistaking his head for a rock that would break the turtle open. Have you heard of the Erfurt Latrine Disaster? Sixty nobles drowned at the Petersburg Citadel in Germany in 1164 when their combined weight caused the floor to collapse, and they all fell into the latrine cesspit. That’s adding insult to injury.
After our holiday to South America, I have managed to start writing The Favourite Murder again. I managed eight hundred words yesterday. It’s a modest start, but a start. I still have a long way to go, but I have a plan for getting there. Yesterday I learnt, or perhaps relearnt, an interesting thing about writing. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, by which I mean reader. Claire apologised, but she had to give up reading Margery Allingham’s The Tiger in the Smoke. She found that it jumped around too much. I loved it, and it is J.K. Rowling’s favourite crime novel. Writers have to accept that their work is not going to appeal to everyone. As long as it appeals to someone, that’s all we can hope for. We shouldn’t take it as an insult if someone doesn’t like our work.
The illustration is again AI generated. I asked ChatGBT to paint Winston Churchill and George Bernard Shaw arguing. I think it did a good job.