Oily noog

Some miniature delights.

The author of the hoax Betjeman letter mentioned below has identified himself, and to nobody’s great surprise, it was rival biographer Bevis Hillier. A literary banker if ever there was.

Football, which I don’t talk about much, but do follow, rarely offers up memorable lines. Savour then this from France manager Raymond Domenech on the increasingly irritating Chelsea boss Jose Mourinho:

He is the best coach in the world, he said so himself.

Finally, from Jared Diamond’s enthralling Guns, Germs and Steel, which for 378 pages has been patiently scientific and relentlessly prosaic, this moment of inadvertantly Carollian verse:

Most [plants domesticated in the Sohel zone of northern Africa] are still grown mainly just in Ethiopia and remain unknown to Amercians - including Ethiopia’s narcotic chat, its banana-like ensete, its oily noog

The oily noog goes right on the list of things that I must see.