Mark Mason talks about trivia via books, articles, guided walks and the pub.
Not many beekeepers ferry so many black bin liners in and out of their tower block that the local council suspect them of running a crack den (the same council who have missed the real crack den in the basement). Not many beekeepers transport their hives in a decommissioned London taxi, narrowly avoiding disaster when
Is there any chance that you might, at any point in the next three weeks, be talking to anyone? About anything, in any setting, for any length of time? Then you’d better get a copy of The British Olympics by Martin Polley. Because it won’t matter what the primary purpose of your conversation is supposed
Unpredicted Consequences of the eBook Number 371: more people are reading as they walk along. I say ‘more’. Actually I’ve seen two, in as many weeks. So this is a prediction rather than an observation. But it’s one I’m pretty confident about. It struck me as I watched the people in question — both 20-something
Have you ever written to an author? It’s the norm these days, or at least emailing or Tweeting them is. But it’s not that long since contacting a writer meant applying pen to paper, then stamp to envelope, then feet to pavement until you reached the postbox. Real effort, and not that many people did
E-books are going to win. Anyone who’s seen a bus or a train carriage or a café lately knows that: Kindles everywhere, as though they’re breeding. And that’s as it should be. Stand in the way of convenient technology which people want, and you’re in the same position as every refusenik from the Luddites to
On Desert Island Discs the other day, Peter Ackroyd chose a pen and some paper as his luxury. ‘Do you write longhand?’ asked Kirsty Young. Ackroyd’s reply was really intriguing: yes, he does write longhand – but only his fiction. To write one genre by hand but another on computer might seem bizarre, including to
I’ve recently been going to bed with Alan Bennett. He’s a very comforting presence as I drift off to sleep, his gentle voice soothing me with tales of what he’s been up to that day, or sometimes anecdotes from his long and successful past. It’s a real treat, the last thing I hear before nodding
I’ve realised what the perfect non-fiction book is. You’d think that as someone who writes non-fiction books for a living I’d be excited by this discovery, and would even now be scribbling feverishly away so as to hit the top of the bestseller lists before anyone else has the same idea. Trouble is, the perfect
There’s too much male blubbing in public life Last Sunday’s London Marathon had me in tears. Not as I battled agonisingly through the wall at 20 miles. No, I was at home on the sofa, with the digestives. And yet again — it happens every year — I blubbed softly at the inspirational tales, the
The London Underground is methadone for people with nerd habits. Were it not for its twisty, multi-coloured map, its place in the capital’s history, its tendency to throw up facts such as ‘the QE2 would fit inside North Greenwich station’, we’d be on the hard stuff. The smack of nerd-dom. We’d be on the platform
It’s every writer’s nightmare – losing the only existing copy of your current book. Doesn’t happen that often these days, what with the mantra of the modern world being ‘Thou Shalst Back Up’. What’s particularly galling for Francis Wheen is that he had backed up, in the surest way possible, namely printing out a copy
Most of the time life is messy. But sometimes — just occasionally — it all comes together. I’d been reading Howards End. One of the classics I’d never got round to. Hadn’t even seen the film starring Emma Thompson, on account of it being a film starring Emma Thompson. By two-thirds of the way through
Every time I do a ‘CTRL F’ search, allowing my computer to achieve in milliseconds what it took the schoolboy me hours to do (find a particular word among pages and pages of text), I think of a small business centre in Sheffield, and imagine its occupants to be shaking in fear at the onward
Can we please have an inquiry into why already talented people are allowed to go off and be brilliant at something else too? As a quarter of Blur, Alex James (above), spent a decade creating critically acclaimed yet commercially successful pop anthems, thereby earning himself access to more drink, drugs and Doris than you could
Which books (if any) have you got in the loo at the moment? The term ‘loo book’ has come to mean ‘lightweight/undemanding humour book’ – but does it have to mean that? The three titles currently gracing my own cistern have made me consider the question. They’re Collected Poems by Philip Larkin, The Magic of
In a couple of weeks, Alan Bean will turn 80. He’s not planning any special celebration. If he does go out, it will probably be to a local restaurant in Houston, Texas. ‘I’ve eaten barbecue at this restaurant once a week, have done for 15 years,’ he tells me. ‘Nobody there has any idea that
Are you awed by an autograph? Swayed by a signature? As you peruse the shelves and tables of a bookshop, is your eye drawn more readily to a cover if it bears one of those little stickers announcing that the copy in question has been signed by the author? Plenty of people’s eyes are, apparently.
In December 2005, a passenger on an early-morning flight from Dallas to Las Vegas fell asleep. Woken by a steward when the plane touched down, the man wearily disembarked and took a connecting flight to San Francisco. It was only there that he realised he’d forgotten an item of hand luggage on the first flight.
I’ve spotted a subtle side-effect of the fact that e-Books don’t actually exist. The ‘not being able to lend a book to your husband/friend/etc when you’ve finished it’ problem is well-known. But less obvious is the fact that when you read a book on a Kindle or an iPad, you can’t accidentally leave things between
Women, I am sometimes forced to conclude, just don’t get it. A cold, sunny day in early January, and I am following a footpath across some fields. This is because I have finally got round to a biography of Captain Lawrence Oates which has been sitting in my ‘to read’ pile for at least four