Adventures In Trash: “Today Is Tonight” by Jean Harlow

This is it. The uber-trash novel to beat them all.

There’s a marvellous passage in “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency” in which Dirk Gently goes into a shop and finds a calculator based on the I Ching. It’s a temperamental and mysterious piece of kit, which gives non-numerical answers to simple calculations and answers any questions over the value of 4 with the phrase “A suffusion of yellow”. So, of course, Dirk instantly wants it. And the experience of going from not even knowing the I Ching calculator existed, to wanting it with every particle of his being, to actually having the thing in his hand, all within the space of a few minutes, is the most blissful shopping trip imaginable.

That state of instant-fulfilment-of-stupid-desire pretty much describes my experience of “Today Is Tonight”. I can’t even remember what ridiculous chain of idle Googling events led me to discover its existence. But as soon as I realised Jean Harlow had written a weird novel that wasn’t published until she’d been dead for thirty years, I was instantly filled with a raging desire to read it. And now I have it, hee hee, ha ha, ho ho, and it’s utter, utter nonsense, and I adore it. AbeBooks, this is why I love you with every little scrap of my bookywormy heart.

Not quite as cute as I’d always imagined.

Like all the best trashy novels, the story behind “Today Is Tonight” is almost as strange as the book itself. Back in the 1930s, Jean Harlow was the darling of Hollywood and the screen icon of her age. One night, she had a strange and compelling dream which she used as the basis for a novel. A few years later, she was tragically dead of kidney-failure.

The manuscript then passed to her mother, who did nothing with it. When her mother died, it passed to Jean’s friend Ruth Hamp, who read it and decided it was worth sharing. She passed it to a New York agent, who provided a small amount of spit and polish, then launched it onto the unsuspecting literary scene.

Well, that’s one version of events. The other version is that the entire thing was made up by either publicist Tony Beacon, or screenwriter Carey Wilson, as a publicity stunt. So, of course, people have been arguing about it ever since.

Guess which one the publishers thought was more saleable.

Plot summary. Let me say right now that this is quite possibly the most engagingly mad storyline it’s ever been my privilege to summarise. It’s New York in 1929, and Peter and Judy Lansdowne are rich, beautiful and desperately in love*. Also, Bill (Peter’s best friend / best man / business partner) is in love with Judy too, and they all know it, but they all keep hanging out together anyway, because that could totally happen and would in no way make life awkward or uncomfortable for anyone at all. On the morning after their wedding-anniversary party, Peter goes for a ride to shake off his hangover, falls off his horse and is blinded in a freak accident. Simultaneously the Wall Street Crash arrives, and Bill and Peter’s company (which does…something. It’s never really made clear) goes bankrupt.

Clearly, life is going to have to change for the Lansdownes. Judy decides that telling Peter that the whole economy has gone to Hell in a handcart would be far too distressing, because reasons, so she instead she tells him that Mr Best Man And Business Partner Bill has sold the company for $250,000. Well, of course she does. Believing your bestest buddy has sold you down the river and that’s why you’re now poor is clearly much better than understanding that a decade’s worth of stupid speculation has finally caught up with your national economy, and everyone else you know is poor too.

Although since Peter and Judy have enough food, several changes of clothes and live in a building containing rooms and built of bricks, maybe they ought to consider getting over themselves. JUST AN IDEA.

Judy and Peter move to a poor person’s apartment in town, and are poor, and unhappy, and poor, and lonely and poor, and struggling, and poor. Judy still finds time to do charity work, because Mary-Sue, and ends up appearing as Lady Godiva in a Charity tableau, because let’s face it, we all would, right? An unscrupulous night-club owner then offers her $250 a week to reprise her nekkid-lady act. It’s a great opportunity to earn some money. But she’ll have to be out of the house at night.

Now here’s the good bit. Literally the only way she can think of to resolve this dilemma (I mean, seriously, it really is. She doesn’t consider other options and then discard them, then come up with her winning idea. This is honestly all she’s got) is to alter her and Peter’s schedule so that day becomes night, and vice versa. Because blind people don’t have Circadian rhythms, or hearing, or the ability to sense changes in temperature, or brains, or anything at all really, and are basically just useless lumps of animated carbon sitting around eating and taking up space until they die.

Against the odds, this actually works for a while, and only goes wrong when Bill the Best Man finds out what Judy’s up to. In a touching scene at Bill’s apartment, Judy forces Bill to confess he’s in love with her, sobs on his shoulder, tells him she thinks she should have maybe married him instead of Peter, then starts an affair, because look, I just work here, okay? Meanwhile, Peter decides to break out of leave the apartment, and almost instantly discovers (via the medium of a cheery Irish cabby) that Judy has swapped their entire schedule around.

You or I might think that was a good time to sit down and have a serious marital conversation, but not Peter. Peter thinks this is a good time to start spying on his wife (surely the occupation least suited to someone with a catastrophic visual impairment), to try and find out what she’s doing. Somehow this leads to a career as a Novelty Blind Showbiz Reporter for “one of the morning newspapers”, during the course of which he happens across Judy with her kit off, riding a horse and hiding behind her hair. Strange three-way denouement in which Judy decides to torture Bill some more by telling him she’s leaving Peter for him, then changing her mind, and somehow that’s a happy ending, because more reasons. The end. Roll credits.

Yes, you did just read all of that. No, I am not making this up. Yes, I did actually enjoy it and am seriously recommending you give it a try. Yes, I can justify that statement.

There are lots of things I love about this fantastically odd novel, but one of my favourite things has got to be the quirky little glimpses it gives into the time it comes from. It’s in the nature of trashy novels to disappear, leaving only the good stuff behind; and by its very nature, the good stuff is rather more timeless. The Great Gatsby is the defining novel of 1920s New York, and one day if I’m lucky then I’ll maybe write something that comes within a thousand miles of being as good, and die happy. But as much as it moves me to tears of wonder, The Great Gatsby doesn’t give me details like these:

[Judy] drew her skirts above her knees. Peter had seen Judy’s knees before. As a matter of fact, the modes of the moment were such as to make it impossible for anyone looking at Judy at all not to observe a goodly portion of their loveliness. (p27)

“What were you saying to that Everett girl, Peter – you don’t think her back is nicer than mine, do you?” (p28)

One of [the showgirls] reminded Bill of Sally. It was the flat smooth area of flesh beneath her armpit. Sally was always exposing and exploiting this particular charm. (p145)

Knees, backs, the bit of skin beneath the armpit. The erogenous zones of a different age. In today’s tits-and-ass culture, it’s easy to call this “a more innocent age” – except that the heroine poses naked in a nightclub to pay the rent and has an affair with her husband’s best friend. Maybe it’s just the erogenous zones of a totally different sort of wardrobe. My grandmothers were a bit too young to wear clothes like these, but my great-aunts would have come of age and partied in them. I wonder if men used to look at their underarm areas and swoon? (I wonder if they shaved?)

On a less anthropological note, I adore the details that clearly must have meant something to the original writer, but which make absolutely no sense at all to anyone else. Here’s a completely surreal moment just before Judy makes her paid debut:

I’ll bet anything you like that nobody knows I’m wearing pants, but they’re very important at the moment, even if they don’t show. When I get my first week’s salary out of this job, I’m going to give ten dollars to that nice drug store lady who invented me this lanolin cold cream. It’s at least a quarter of an inch thick. (p143)

So that’s a quarter inch thick of lanolin cream, covering (assuming this is American pants rather than British ones) her entire lower body? And she’s going to try and sit on a horse in that lot? I’d honestly rather be naked.

Want yet another reason to read this magnificent piece of cultural ephemera? You got it. After her first successful night at work, Judy gets back to discover Peter has been getting all creative and tying string all over the apartment so he can start to get about the place (presumably, he’s just spent the last few months sitting in a chair and peeing into a milk-bottle). For some reason this triggers a bizarre stream-of-consciousness ramble on the subject of philosophy:

It would be very easy to write a book about philosophy. It wouldn’t be good philosophy but it would be philosophy. All you have to do is begin every eighth sentence with the words, “All men are -” or “Every woman will -” and all men or women will think you are saying something important. If I had a stenographer to take down what I was thinking, it would be an awful lesson to George Bernard Shaw. (p156)

And there’s more:

Now I’m laughing at myself because all sentences beginning with the words “all sentences” are silly. Maybe all sentences themselves are silly. But I’m not going to give up without inventing one epigram. An epigram is an amusing statement of an untruth designed to make the effect tasty if not digestible. What am I talking about? (p156)

George might know. But George isn’t telling.

I’ve read as many reviews as I can find of “Today Is Tonight” – partly to reassure myself that I wasn’t the only person who gave a damn about its existence, and partly to find out what everyone else made of this truly magnificent folly. Unsurprisingly, most of the people who’ve taken the time to review it are unabashed Jean Harlow fans – people who’ve seen her movies, toured the places she lived and worked, visited her grave. And one of the biggest themes I’ve noticed is how very, very much most readers want it to actually be the work of Jean Harlow – rather than the work of two men cashing in on Jean Harlow’s name.

I don’t know a thing about Jean Harlow other than what I’ve read on her Wikipedia page, and while it’s possible I’ve seen some of her films while off sick from school, I couldn’t tell you a single thing about any one of them. Nevertheless, I’m going to go ahead and say I’m damn sure Ms Harlow had a hand in this thing somewhere. As lots of other reviewers have pointed out, the book’s littered with an insider’s eye for theatrical detail – the exact scent and adhesive properties of spirit gum, the heat and the blinding quality of the stage lights, the back-stage bustle that accompanies the star’s big entrance. And lots of other people have noticed the “cinematic” quality of the writing – the way it often describes what the camera would see, and how the shot would be composed.

The thing that really convinces me, though, is the sheer weirdness of the finished product. Let’s be honest. If you were going to fake a novel written by a long-dead Hollywood star in order to bolster interest in a new biography, I’m pretty sure you’d include a more plausible plot, better dialogue, fewer stage horses, and almost no digressions on the possibility of out-philosophising George Bernard Shaw. But if you did that, you’d take out almost everything I like about this book. Because however ridiculous this book is, it’s also charming – in the way writing often is when it’s written in a breathless rush and without any thought for what anyone will make of it, because the Plot Bunny has you by the throat and you simply have to get your idea down on paper somehow.

No-one argues when the General comes calling. No-one.

Clearly, this isn’t a great work of literature. Without Jean Harlow’s name attached to it, I’m pretty certain it would never have seen the light of day. But I’d rather read “Today Is Tonight”, flaws and all, than all the polished, competent, soul-less ghost-written sleb productions in the world. Jean, you weren’t a literary genius, but I’m pretty sure your book was actually yours, at least in part. And for that, I salute you.

*This is “desperately in love” in the sense of “even on her wedding-day, Judy did wonder with a moderate degree of seriousness whether she ought to have married the best man Bill instead, and also Judy is now doing a bit of an Amelia-Sedley-Bella-Swan-dog-in-the-manger act as regards Bill’s romantic prospects. So, that’s nice.

“Today Is Tonight” is out of print, but AbeBooks regularly has copies. If you have some semblance of self-control, you’ll pay a lot less for your copy than I did.

Great Moments In Retailing: Costcutter, South Cave

Not pictured: Razorblade Crisps, Burn Marshmallows, Discomfort Doughnuts, Agony Cheesecake.

Guess the brief: “Weightwatchers” Patsy Kensit advert

“Okay, so we want to perpetuate the lazy yet profitable stereotype that “thin” is a direct synonym for “beautiful”, while also paying lip-service to the notion that women have value as autonomous human beings rather than merely as objectified walking statues.”

“To achieve this, we will show a thinner-than-average celebrity in killer heels, being groomed and brushed like a prize pig in a county show and contorting herself into unnatural poses for the camera, while repeatedly using the word ‘confidence’. This will demonstrate in every possible way that we think women should define their self-worth entirely by how closely they conform to a near-unachievable aesthetic standard, without actually saying the words BE THIN AND WEAR MAKE-UP AND STRUGGLE AROUND IN STUPID SHOES OR YOU WILL BE UGLY AND HATEFUL AND NO-ONE WILL LIKE YOU EVER.

“And just to round things off, we’ll include the word ‘sparkle’. Because, as everyone knows, all women should be glittery like diamonds and tinsel.”

Adventures In Trash: The “Song Of Ice And Fire” Series by George RR Martin

If Anyone Ever Gets In Your Face For Liking Fantasy Novels, This Is The Book You Clobber Them Over The Head With

When I was about thirteen, my mum and dad gave me a copy of “The Lord of the Rings” for Christmas. I think it’s safe to say that I soon became completely obsessed. I read my original copy until it fell to pieces, then read three more copies to total destruction. I read the appendices. I read the introduction. I re-read “The Hobbit”, and then went back and re-considered “The Lord of the Rings” in the light of its prequel. I even tried to read “The Silmarillion”, and got a surprisingly long way into it before finally accepting that it really wasn’t going to happen.

This was in the days before the Internet, so I managed not to shame myself by writing reams of terrible gawky fan-fiction and then posting them in a public place, but just so we’re clear; the only reason it didn’t happen was because no-one told me such things were possible.

Fortunately I was also too young to get inked, or this would totally have been me.

Oh, I loved that book so much, I did. And then when the films came out, I re-read it, and it all went sort of wrong.

Things that, I now realise, are clearly all sorts of wrong with Lord of the Rings
1. The bad guys have no real motivation. They are just evil because, um, because they’re evil. The end.
2. Generally speaking, how good-looking you are correlates perfectly with how good a person you are.
3. Generally speaking, what sort of person you are will be determined almost entirely by what sort of person your parents were.
4. If you’re a woman, you will only be important if you’re beautiful. And even if you’re beautiful, you won’t be that important.
5. “Love” is just something that happens when two people who have the right sort of noble ancestry are left alone together in a suitably poetic setting for longer than about four seconds. There will no requirement for shared experiences or direct conversation.
6. If you’re a woman, you will not be allowed to get married until your father gives you permission. This will be true even if you have been alive for thousands of years.
7. If you come from a superior, long-lived race, it will be totally acceptable for you to spend most of your life blethering on about how much better everything was in the Olden Days. This will be considered as the height of sophisticated melancholy and not at all annoying. No-one will ever tell you to shut up.
8. When engaged in the reckless slaughter of other sentient beings, said reckless slaughter will become totally justified as long as you sing in an epic manner while completing your mission of destruction.
9. When you have a long journey to undertake, the best way to complete it is on foot through enemy territory. This is true even if you have access to super-fast horses and / or gigantic eagles capable of carrying people for long distances and over difficult, waterless terrain.
10. Hereditary monarchy is the apex of societal achievement, and implementing it will instantly lead to maximum happiness, prettier babies, better beer and simply terrific weather throughout the realm.

Wait, what – ? Who mentioned “Lord of the Rings”? Why are you making me talk about this stuff anyway? This was supposed to be a review of George RR Martin’s “A Song and Ice and Fire” – a Fantasy epic totally unlike “Lord of the Rings”, and which has restored my flagging faith in the capacity of Fantasy series to be simultaneously Fantastic, and also…fantastic.

“A Song of Ice and Fire” is a still-to-be-finished sequence of novels (“A Game of Thrones”, “A Clash of Kings”, “A Storm of Swords”, “A Feast for Crows” and “A Dance with Dragons”) set in and round the land of Westeros, where summer and winter both last for years at a time. Westeros consists of many, many fiefdoms of various sizes, currently united under the rule of the hotly-contested Iron Throne. To the North, a gigantic wall of ice hundreds of feet high keeps out the Wildlings and other bad guys.

It seems sort of insane to try and summarise the plot of a series that’s currently running at about 5,000 pages and still isn’t finished, but I’ll have a go. First, Westeros is collapsing into civil war as all the minor kings compete for the Iron Throne. Second, the sole surviving heir of the last-but-one monarch – a beautiful girl called Daenerys Targaryen – has managed to hatch out three Dragon’s eggs and is planning to reclaim her birthright. And thirdly, a terrible winter is coming, and Winter means the arrival of The Others – terrible undead Zombie type creatures who live(?) beyond the Wall and are massing for an attack.

Everything is better with zombies. Everything.

I’ve probably made this series sound like a bad mash-up of every other Fantasy series you’ve ever thrown at the wall in disgust at its formulaic characters, crappy stereotypes, unrealistic fight scenes, stilted dialogue and general failure to be as good as “Lord of the Rings” (look, who keeps mentioning “Lord of the Rings” anyway? It’s getting very annoying). Trust me; it isn’t. This is the Fantasy series I recommend to people who think they don’t like Fantasy, because it’s completely brilliant, but in a completely different way to the other, more compulsory Fantasy novel written by that odd professor type who also had “RR” in his name somewhere.

Top Ten Reasons Why “A Song Of Ice And Fire” is both brilliant, and nothing like “Lord of the Rings”

1. There are no good guys and bad guys. There are just a bunch of guys.
No, really, go with me on this. The big problem with most Fantasy stories is that you know how they’re going to turn out. An assorted collection of good people go on a seemingly impossible quest to defeat some bad people – possibly because of some sort of unexpected Speshul Destiny which has been passed on to one of more of them by an inconvenient relative. They wander the land for a bit, have some cool adventures, collect a few magical objects, learn some stuff, make new friends. And eventually, they defeat the bad guys, exactly like you always knew they would, because, well, because that’s just how it works, m’kay?

I read quite a lot of Fantasy, and I like to think I’m pretty good at spotting outcomes. I have read five thousand pages of “A Song of Ice and Fire”, and I still can’t make any real prediction about how it’s going to turn out. Well, okay; I’m pretty sure it won’t end with “And then The Others ate the soul of the last surviving human, and all of Westeros was laid waste and Spring never came again”. But other than that? I got nothing. My number one pick for final control of the Iron Throne is currently not even on the right continent. My number two pick got his about two and a half books in, number three is at severe risk of dying of plague, and number four is currently in unknown condition after being possibly assassinated by his own men. Most of my rank outsiders are fighting amongst themselves, and my ridiculous long-shot appears to have died off-screen.

Also, almost everyone who is trying to come out as Top King (or Queen) is convinced they have a manifest destiny to rule, most of them have some sort of prophecy to back this up and all of them genuinely think they have the moral high ground. There are no people trying to be in charge just because they’re Officially Evil. I have given up on trying to call this one. I’m actually going to have to wait and see.

2. People die, like, all the time, and it’s permanent.
Generally speaking, in traditional fantasy stories, none of the people you like will die. There might be one main character who ends up dead in the end, but his death will be clearly signalled from the start, and he was kind of an idiot anyway, so you’re okay with it.

George RR Martin is famous for regularly killing off important characters – even the really cool ones who’ve been with you from the start and who you secretly sort of fancy. Also, they won’t always die in a sensible or meaningful way. Sometimes they die in big set-piece events. Sometimes they die fighting battles you’d sort of assumed they were going to win. Sometimes they die from seemingly insignificant wounds. Sometimes they die in stupid arguments in pubs.

Also, these characters stay dead. There’s none of this long-time-I-fell, naked-I-was-sent-back, perfect-resurrection nonsense in Westeros. On the odd occasion when someone goes to the tremendous trouble of bringing back a dead person, the results are utterly terrifying.

Even being played by Sean Bean won’t guarantee your survival

3. Eventually, you find yourself sympathising with almost every character in the book.
Two of the least appealing characters in the series are Jaime and Cersei Lannister – beautiful blonde twins whose first act in the book is to throw a small boy off a high tower, to prevent him from telling Cersei’s husband Robert that she’s secretly having sex with her brother and all of Robert’s kids are actually Jaime’s. That’s sort of a hard position to recover from. But even this vile couple aren’t vile all the time. As well as sleeping with his sister and pushing small children off high places, Jaime also risks his life to save his (female) captor from rape and torture. Cersei…well, being honest, there’s not much to say for Cersei’s behaviour. But then she was forced to marry a man she can hardly stand the sight of, so at least there’s an explanation.

If somebody made me get into bed with this man every night, I’m not sure how long I could answer for my behaviour either

4. No elves. Not one.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve really had about all I can stand of long-lived pointy-eared warriors telling me how much better life was when they were in charge and how they can’t wait to get off this awful continent and go live somewhere better – all the while flaunting their exceptional beauty and immaculate poetic sensibilities in my inferior human face.

I mean, okay, fair point. Humanity is flawed, okay? We’re greedy and rapacious and venal and easily distracted. I get it. The elves are right. It’s still annoying.

In “A Song of Ice and Fire”, we’re pretty much in a humans-only zone. Tyrion Lannister is routinely described as a dwarf, but in the sense of “is a person with dwarfism” rather than “is a whole separate race who are mysteriously much cooler than we are”. There are a few non-human sentient beings among the Wildlings near the Wall. But they don’t write poetry, or go on and on and on and on and on and on and on about how much they can’t wait to get on a boat and leave, so I’m prepared to put up with them.

STOP PRESS: Shorter-than-average actor finally given opportunity to play within own species.

5. Pleasingly earthy vocabulary
I’ve written before about the distressing tendency of Fantasy authors to write about sex using far too many euphemisms and capital letters – as if our ancestors spent all their time thinking up beautiful flowery phrases for one another’s genitals. Not here. A spade is a spade, a penis is a cock, a vagina is a cunt.

Also, no-one’s all that hung up on doing stuff in private. Excretion isn’t that much less public (or more rude) than ingestion, and copulation isn’t much less discreet than either of these. Which, in a world of chamber-pots and body-servants, makes total sense.

6. Realistic aftermath of battles
Remember that bit in “Lord of the Rings” where everyone looked out over the battlefield outside Minas Tirith and reeled in horror at the sheer reeking awfulness of all those dead bodies? No, neither do I, because Tolkien completely glosses over it. It’s like the Corpse Gnomes just come along in the night and clear up all the mess before it can start rotting away and giving everyone cholera.

If anything, Martin goes a little bit too far the other way in describing the yacky maggoty awfulness of trying to clean up after several thousand simultaneous violent deaths. There’s definitely a limit to the number of descriptions of unburied corpses that any novel needs to contain, and it’s possible “A Song of Ice and Fire” exceeds this total. But hey, at least we’re not trying to pretend it’s possible to clear away thousands of dead bodies without any visible effort and no need to bury anyone.

“I’m sure I left five thousand dead bodies here yesterday…”

7. If two characters happen to be in the same rough geographical area, and it would be really, really good for them both to meet each other, it’s still more than possible they won’t actually manage to make contact
In books and films, all you have to do to find someone you want to meet up with is be on the same planet. In real life, we can manage to miss each other in a crowded bar. I really sort of love that Martin’s characters repeatedly pass each other on battlefields, gaze at each other across rivers, mistake each other for enemies, get confused by people who look a bit like other people, and generally just behave like normal human beings, living in a very big world with very poor transportation.

8. There be dragons. And the dragons be bastards
It’s a personal thing, but this is a personal review, so I’m going to say it; friendly talking dragons in adult novels do my head in. For kids, fair enough, but for grown-ups – come on. Dragons are flying fire-breathing lizards. They’re pretty much your dictionary definition of reptilian apex predator. And I refuse to acknowledge the existence of a reptilian apex predator that doesn’t want to eat people.

As of the end of book five, Daenerys’s three dragons are big, moody, badly-trained and have taken to eating people. Not out of some deep sense of injustice and a desire to put the world to rights (or not as far as we can tell, anyhow…these dragons, thank the Gods, are of the non-talking variety). It’s just that they don’t make any real distinction between meaty snacks on four legs, and meaty snacks on two legs. I like that.

Has no place in novels for grown-ups.

9. I can read the books without needing to refer to the genealogies
Some writers seem to feel that, when creating gigantic casts of characters, rather than make them all distinctive and memorable, you can just provide a massive list at the back for readers to refer to. When I am King, these writers will be taken outside and shot for the good of humanity.

Because I don’t especially want a foot of High Fantasy novels on my bookshelves, I went for the Kindle versions. Then I looked again at what I’d just bought, and wondered if I’d made the right choice. Kindle books are great for space-saving, but not so good when you want to flick through to the back to check up on exactly who it was who just got slaughtered in battle and why you’re supposed to care.

I haven’t counted, but I’m pretty sure “A Song of Ice and Fire” has more characters than any other book I’ve read, including “Lord of the Rings” (shut up, Wesley!) and “Gone with the Wind”. If there was ever a series where I was going to want to refer to the genealogies at the back, this was the one. I never have to refer to the genealogies, because Martin is the kind of writer who prefers to create distinctive and memorable characters rather than writing a shopping-list.

10. George RR Martin is refusing to be hurried
The last four Harry Potter books are like an object lesson in why it’s a terrible idea to put pressure on authors to produce massive, epic blockbusters to a ludicrous deadline. Martin is now officially horribly late with “The Winds of Winter”. His explanation, magnificently, is that he wants it to actually be good. And personally, I think that’s brilliant. I’d much rather wait another year, or even another five years, and have a book the author’s pleased with, than have a badly-edited first draft riddled with adverbs. George, in the extremely unlikely event that you’re reading this, I’m really, really, really looking forward to the next instalment. But I get why you want to take your time.

Just, you know…please don’t die before you finish, you know? Because that would seriously upset me.

“A Song of Ice and Fire” is available from Amazon as either a shelf-load of books or a series of digital files. But personally I think the most satisfying way to buy it would be to hunt down all the editions second-hand from charity shops. In fact I sort of wish that’s what I’d done now. Damn it.

Great Moments In Retailing: Strange Instructional Signage, Ladies Toilet, Holiday Inn

“…anywhere in the sink will be fine.”

Seven Tesco Instore Signs Which Are Now Automatically Ironic

Readers from outside the UK may not be aware that our biggest Supermarket chain, Tesco, was recently discovered to have been accidentally putting horse-meat in its beefburgers.

Interesting topics for a blog piece about horsemeat in Tesco burgers:

- Do we, as consumers, want to buy beefburgers (or indeed anything) from a company that – unlike your average six-year-old – can’t reliably tell the difference between a horse and a cow?
- If they’re making burgers with the wrong species of animal, what other horrors might be lurking in their supply-chain?
- Why are so many of us totally down with eating one grass-fed domesticated herbivore, but completely appalled at the thought of eating another slightly different one?

“In your FACE, cows and pigs and sheep and chickens and goats!”

Childish and juvenile topics for a blog piece about horsemeat in Tesco burgers:

- Spend a morning roaming around a local branch of Tesco, enjoying how much of their in-store signage now comes with its own unspoken horse-related punchline.

Well, what can I tell you? I have a sense-of-humour age of about six, and still think Viz is one of the great comic achievements of our age.

Let’s start with their apology. To be fair to Tesco, they have acknowledged that what happened was disturbing and wrong for many reasons, and they have shared this apology at various points around the store (including this one, stuck to the outside of the frozen-burger cabinet).

Apparently they’re introducing “a comprehensive system of DNA testing across all our meat products”. My personal view is that if you find yourself in a relationship – business or personal – where you have to resort to DNA testing to keep the other party honest, then you should maybe start looking for another person to have sex with or buy horse-meat off or whatever, but maybe that’s just me.

I might also have taken a quick squizz at some of the other signs on display around the store, and asked myself if they were still working as well as they had been a couple of weeks ago:

Good to know, right?

I also really like this one:

“…unless you’re watching your Horse intake. In which case frankly, you’re on your own.”

(I wonder, how easy is it to milk a horse? Anyone reading who’s ever tried it? Are they easier or harder than cows?)

From over by the In-store Bakery:

“…for example, by ensuring children from less well-off backgrounds are given the crucial life-skills needed to tell the difference between horses and cows.

Also, Horse Rescue Centres.”

Of course, horse-meat is a dietary staple in a lot of countries. Maybe that’s what they’re getting at here:

This one is my personal favourite:

And finally, this is the one I saw on my way out:

“Horse-meat Value Burgers. Keeping it real since 1919.”

Great Moments In Retailing: Mysterious…Thing…, Toys’R'Us, Hull

Well, that explains everything.