Surely it was in this chapter, around about here, halfway down the left hand side.
But it never is.
So now I have to remember to insert a sheet of paper in any book I might want to write about to avoid that debacle. An elementary piece of the book reviewer's methodology, one might have thought, but I've learnt the hard way.We will wait until then for some thoughts on Bate's Ted which would be amazing enough were I not also reading another book, more slowly, less highbrow and for some louche relief at bedtime, which is Graham Lord's Just the One, The Wives and Times of Jeffrey Bernard. Oh, My Giddy Aunt. It would make anybody with bohemian aspirations feel completely outclassed. It makes even Ted look as if he wasn't even trying to attract women. It makes Dylan Thomas look like a discerning wine-taster. Each page has more delinquency and vagabond ruin than any other book can muster in its entirety. I can't recommend it highly enough except to say that its monumental decadence is magnificent beyond all imagining until you realize quite how sad it is. He surely makes Baudelaire look lke Freddie Bartholomew. I can think of no higher tribute.
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But tune in next week for the Hughes as well as, either on Thursday night or Friday (who's to say these days), the Saturday Nap as Bookiebasher goes for the hat-trick.
Not spending much time in betting shops now in the internet age, I've found the magic one, Betfred in Cosham, on whose telly my horses never lose. Traditions are quickly established and, slipping out for a late lunch from the office, the highlight of a Friday is now going there to see the selection win as easy as you like, as Onefitzall did today. And if Betfred is The Bonus King, the bonus is where you have another tenner just to establish one's bona fides and not get thrown out as a vagrant.
Let's get carried away on a temporary wave of tipping success while we can on the day that Peter O'Sullevan was remembered. This is what the Saturday Nap was supposed to be like, not a litany of excuses but a page in my notebook where the results column says WW, for 'won, won' and genuinely thinks we can extend it to W Six Times, the old formbook comment that is shorthand for 'waited with will win when wanted'. You see, there is poetry everywhere, even in the formbook.
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It's not good news that Stephen Fry is standing down from the chair of QI but I think he might return as a guest one day and then we'll see. Sandi Toskvig, of the Women's Party, will take the show into the second half of the alphabet while, I dare say, Stephen does something More Interesting instead. Like, whatever happened to that film about Handel he was supposed to be making. Get on with it, lad.
But we must give Sandi her chance. She had a good story on an old episode I saw this week in which she was to make a programme about sailing round the coast of Britain and had to go to be measured for a life-jacket. She still has the business card from the life-jacket expert who measured her for it at the prestigious life-jacket company. And his name was Will Drowne.
