Unpredictable pleasures

As befits a magazine with an erudite and international readership, I shall begin this review with a short salutation in the Western Greenland Eskimo language: ‘Ata, sûlorsimavutit!’

The phrase, as some of you — although I fear reprehensibly few — will know means: ‘Well, now you have again relieved yourself in your trousers.’ One can, I think, deduce two things from this.

As befits a magazine with an erudite and international readership, I shall begin this review with a short salutation in the Western Greenland Eskimo language: ‘Ata, sûlorsimavutit!’

The phrase, as some of you — although I fear reprehensibly few — will know means: ‘Well, now you have again relieved yourself in your trousers.’ One can, I think, deduce two things from this. The first is that Western Greenlanders must pee in their trousers an awful lot if they need so few words to describe it, and the second is that anyone who chooses to include a snippet like this in an anthology plainly possesses a collector’s eye for absurdity.

For the last 40 years, John Julius Norwich has been sending out an annual Christmas Cracker — a collection of choice bits and pieces — to his friends instead of a Christmas card. Then, every ten years, he publishes a compilation of the decade’s Crackers. This is the fourth compilation and it’s just as full of unpredictable pleasures as its predecessors. It’s also not the sort of book that should be read on public transport by anyone fearful of making an exhibition of themselves.

Here, by way of a palate sharpener, is an extract from an interview with Madonna conducted by the Hungarian magazine, Blikk. The questions were asked in Hungarian and then translated into English. Madonna’s replies were then translated into Hungarian.