Mark Mason talks about trivia via books, articles, guided walks and the pub.
You’ve already seen a picture of the Essex-Suffolk border. Assuming you’ve seen Constable’s ‘The Haywain’, that is: the Stour (the river into which the farmer has cleverly driven his cart) forms the county boundary, meaning the land on the left is Suffolk, that on the right, Essex. Years of David Beckham and jokes about girls
This book kept reminding me of Robin Williams in One Hour Photo. Just as his character spied on customers’ private lives while developing their pictures, so Chris Paling gets to know the readers at the library where he works. Unlike Williams he doesn’t follow them home at the end of the day (in fact some
Why will people simply not believe you when you tell them that you don’t want to dance? Their reactions mimic the classic pattern of grief: first confusion, then denial, then anger. They tug at your arm like they’re trying to pull it from the socket. ‘Come on, you have to dance!’ ‘No I don’t.’ ‘Oh
British placenames are so good you can read the map for entertainment rather than navigation. Hardington Mande-ville, Bradford Peverell, Carlton Scroop — they sound like characters in a novel. In fact, P.G. Wodehouse often raided the atlas when writing: Lord Emsworth is named after a town in Hampshire, while a village in the same county
The new year is here, so why not kick off 2017 with the Spectator’s New Year’s Day pub quiz, set by Mark Mason. It’s the perfect way to fix a sore head. Just add water and paracetamol. ‘I didn’t hit him, but it came close. For reasons best known to him, he came on unwilling to talk.’
Inventor of the silky teabag, take a bow. You have achieved something that until now no one would have thought possible. You have taken an item so simple, so perfect, so completely suited to its purpose that the idea of ruining it had occurred to literally no one — and you have ruined it. You
One of David Cameron’s choices on Desert Island Discs, this book reminds us, was ‘Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West)’. The book does not, however, explain why Cameron chose the Benny Hill ditty. Consulting the online archive, I found the then leader of the opposition explaining that ‘when you’re asked to sing a song’,
It all began with oysters. Londoners used to eat them as they walked along, throwing away the shells much as they do burger wrappers now. Lord George Cavendish, owner of Burlington House on Piccadilly (now the Royal Academy), was sick of shells littering his garden, and so in 1819 decided to open a shopping arcade
The secret to keeping any relationship going is, of course, to see as little of each other as possible. We all know what familiarity breeds, so there’s no point pushing your luck. Imagine my delight, therefore, on discovering a holiday company that specialises in separating you from your other half while you’re away. Well, for
Earlier this year my partner paid several hundred thousand pounds for an Aga. There’s no other way of putting it. A major cause of her excitement about our new house was the presence in its kitchen of the whacking great oven. I, on the other hand, was unsure how I felt about it — Aga-nostic,
They’re called quintas, Joana tells us, because the rich families who owned the land along this stretch of the Douro river used to let others work it in return for a fifth of the profits. And in this part of northern Portugal, ‘work’ means only one thing: wine. We’re here in the Douro Valley to
You could say that this book contradicts itself. Robert Moor’s chosen topic is trails — not just walking, where you go for a bit of a stroll and might turn here or might turn there, but specifically trails, where you can only follow one route. He likes them because ‘they are a rigidly bounded experience.
Thirty years ago this week, Queen performed what would turn out to be their last gig, at Knebworth. Their penultimate concert, at Wembley, was shown on Channel 4. I recorded it, and became obsessed. Time after time I watched-Freddie Mercury prance on to the stage sporting a moustache you could have swept a factory floor
Quick tip, should you ever find yourself alone in the interview room at the police headquarters of Prince George’s County, Maryland: don’t go to sleep. The officers will see you through the peephole and assume you’re guilty. Anyone innocent finding themselves in that windowless, 8ft by 8ft room paces around, bounces on their toes and
Strawberries. Ella Fitzgerald. Lying on the beach. They’re three of my ‘guilty displeasures’. You haven’t heard of the guilty displeasure? That’s because the concept hasn’t been invented yet. But it needs to be — and quick. The phrase ‘guilty pleasure’ is widely known. It was coined by the DJ Sean Rowley, who, not content with
It’s slightly galling, after years of sticking up for Paul McCartney, to read a new biography of the bloke and realise that you don’t, in the end, really like him that much. But that’s how good Philip Norman’s book is — Macca has no agenda, it simply lets you make up your mind. And for
Water accounts for 70 per cent of your planet, and 60 per cent of your body. Yet when do you ever stop to consider it? The quirks and habits and secrets of good old H2O were crying out to have a book written about them. That said, it had to be written by the right
You have to pity the Welsh woman who was last week prevented by the Court of Appeal from naming her daughter ‘Cyanide’. An unusual choice, admittedly. And the mother’s defence — Cyanide is a ‘lovely, pretty name’ because it was the drug Hitler used to kill himself ‘and I consider that this was a good
It’s the only thing Bianca Jagger and I have in common: we’ve both been victims of false memory. You almost certainly have, too. False memory is the meanest trick your brain can play on you. Instead of refusing to admit that it can’t recall something, the treacherous little creep supplies a wrong answer instead. It’s
The old ditty got it wrong: it should have been ‘Maybe it’s because I’m not a Londoner that I love London so’. The capital’s biggest fans, I tend to find, are those who weren’t born there, and Emily Chappell is yet another example. Originally from Wales, she has written more than just an engaging account
