Readers Digest

Over three days last week I brought myself up to speed on a dozen or so classics of English literature, took a brief management course, taught myself table manners and watched England win a test match at Lords . This means of course that I have been staying at the older brother’s flat in Notting Hill and taking advantage of his lavatorial reading matter when not at the cricket.

Every polite household offers books or magazines for visitors to the lavatory. Usually these are quirky, informative, humorous and digestible a few pages at a time. My friend the Ayatollah even keeps some bottles of wine for the entertainment of those using the smallest room at his Romney Marsh mansion.

The older brother, efficient and self-improving as always, keeps a single 600-page tome for the purpose entitled (appropriately) “Passing Time in the Loo, Volume 1”. This curious book published by Scarab Books (www.loobooks.com) in the US includes short, two-page summaries of around fifty novels and plays; biographies of important people; rules of important games such as baseball and ice hockey; a section on punctuation (which I should really heed more carefully); and quotations ranging from a rather nice Danish saying “Fish and guests smell at three days old”, to Alfred Hitchcock’s “The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder”.

If all that was not enough, the book includes a section of ‘vocabulary building’ words – postulate, orotund, didactic, sophistry – and (specially for me) a chapter headed “Control Your Depression”. This last item might have been required had it not been for excellent performances on the pitch by Messrs. Bopara, Swann and Onions.