Sunday 20 September 2020

Don't Touch It, Don't Look At It

There is a woman who is married to a man who did something in David Cameron's government. To amuse herself, she kept a diary of all the social gatherings she and the husband enjoyed with the various politicians and hangers on of the time. Or possibly she did it to enrich herself, since she has now published the diaries.

Whatever her original motives, excerpts from the diaries are popping up in British newspapers and probably will soon reach papers in Australia, America and other parts of the world.

Having made the mistake of reading a few paragraphs of the excerpts, I feel it is my duty to tell anyone as easily nauseated as I am to try to avoid doing the same. Personally, I think any paper containing such excerpts ought to have been sold with a free sick bag as an insert.

If you find though that, for whatever reason, you cannot entirely avoid these diaries, please, I beg you, take heed of this piece of advice: if, while reading a bit of the book or even a review of it, you catch sight a few lines ahead of the word "pheromones", stop at once, go no further. There are things once read that can't be forgotten, no matter how much you wish they could be, and that passage is one of them. Using a useful but very little known rating system, the Jim Dixon Nause Index, that passage scores 999,000, at the very least.

To put my advice in a single sentence, I must turn to one of the lodestones of English literature, Stanley and Rhoda by Patricia Wells:


The title of perhaps the best Stanley and Rhoda tale, particularly its second half, tells you what I want to tell you better than I ever could:



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