Five things make a newspaper

• The Guardian for Friday 27th October 1995 offers a compendium of 'The Darling Words of Mae' - quotations from Mae West. Several of the best - certainly the best known - come from I'm No Angel (1933):
  
  • Beulah, peel me a grape.
  
  
  • When I'm good I'm very, very good, but when I'm bad, I'm bet­ter.
  
  
  • She's the kind of girl who climbed the ladder of success, wrong by wrong.
  
  Then there's:
  

  
  

  Give a man a free hand and he'll try and put it all over you.

  Klondike Annie, 1936

  
  

  I've been in Who's Who, and I know what's what, but it'll be the first time I ever made the dictionary.

  Letter to the RAF, early 1940s, on having an inflatable life jacket named after her

  
  

  "Goodness, what beau­tiful diamonds!"
  "Good­ness had nothing to do with it, dearie."

  Night After Night, 1932

  
  

  Why don't you come up sometime and see me? I'm home every evening.

  She Done Him Wrong, 1933 (yes, this is apparently the original text)

  
  

  Connie Mines: Oh Miss West, I've heard so much about you.
  MW: Yeah honey, but you cant prove a thing.

  From the television pro­gramme, Mr. Ed, 1960 - wait, Mae West was on Mr. Ed? Oh.Kay.




• At the other extreme, I've been reading today's edition, too. There's a project just waiting for someone with too much time on their hands, to log the writers who appear - who are quoted, profiled, reviewed or reviewers - in the Review, the Saturday books section, because it is obvious on even a desultory reading that certain people form an in-group, who get far more attention than others. Neil Gaiman seems to have joined their number. I don't dispute that Neil Gaiman is a Good Thing, but he appears three times in the first two articles: on page 5 he annotates a copy of The Ocean at the End of the Lane to raise funds for PEN, on page 6 he appears twice in the diary, suppporting the campaign to Let Books Be Books and as an author whose readers are profiled by YouGov's Profiles service. Reaching the centre spread, and a profile of Ursula Le Guin, I reflected that she, too, has entered the enchanted circle, but without the overload - but, wait! here she is receiving the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from - yes! - Neil Gaiman.



• Also in today's Guardian, it seems that Newcastle-upon-Tyne is the UK's best city: with a photo of the Lit & Phil to prove it. An associated article lists Newcastle's top 10 craft beer pubs - I'm not sure what the criteria are for inclusion, but they managed to exclude the Bodega. Note for the bewildered: number 1 on the list, Pleased To Meet You in High Bridge, is (i.e. was) the Turks.



• Last week's travel section had some suggestions for UK seaside holidays in winter. I may be missing the point here, because it seems obvious to me that the seaside is somewhere you can also enjoy in winter. One of their suggestions is Tynemouth - and very nice too. They recommend some places to stay in Oban and Portmeirion, either of which I'd be happy to visit. Curiously, their explanation why you might want to go to Portmeirion is "You can pretend you’re on a Mediterranean holiday..." Some of us might want to pretend we're being pursued along the beach by giant white balls, but the young things who write my newspaper don't mention that...



• Last week's paper also offers a bonus piece of travel writing disguised as a gardening column: Alys Fowler heads to Kazakhstan in search of the origins of the apple. She makes it sound ravishing, but then she doesn't mention the government, with its appalling record on human rights. I liked this, though: "Birds are thought to have carried the seeds of an early apple from China to Kazakhstan, where the Tien Shan brown bear fell in love with them. Bears like big, juicy apples and will hack their way through a tree to get the best fruit, pruning the trees as they go. They poop out the seeds in a perfect germination package. Thus, big, juicy apples do better. Bears don’t roam a great deal, but horses do, and Kazakhstan was one of the first places where they were domesticated. Horses love apples, and distribute the bear-selected apples far and wide." Let me tell you about the birds and the bears (and the apples)...

Flambards in autumn

We went last night to the announcement of the winner of the first Flambard Poetry Prize. There were speeches, and the winner and runner up each read a couple of poems, all of which I thought were fine but none of which grabbed me - which is par for the course. There was an outside chance that I'd be bowled over by something, but the main point of the exercise was to see friends: tea beforehand with Gail at Northern Stage, then at the event itself.

We travelled by train, and I made sure to take with me the book I am currently reading, to entertain me en route: so I had the pleasure of showing Bitter Waters to the publishers of Blood Waters.