Much of Corfu's most famous book consisted of tiny grains of fact, puffed full of air and coated with sugar
✒We're just back from a short holiday on Corfu. Lovely. The sea was three colours: eggshell blue near the beach, royal blue for a hundred yards, navy blue stretching away to Albania. I even enjoyed the food. In the bad old days, tavernas would offer vine leaves wrapped round cold rice, or leathery stuffed peppers. Now you can get delicious scoff: seafood in garlic, chargrilled chicken, calamari that actually taste of the sea, delectable courgettes in paper-thin batter. You can drink pretty good Greek wine too, as well as gagging on retsina. But I still hate moussaka. Beef swimming in oil, slimy aubergines, and a sort of wallpaper paste on top.
✒We went for a boat trip down the coast, and passed the gigantic yacht Ilona, which is owned by Frank Lowy, the Australian billionaire behind the Westfield shopping malls. Later it sailed past our apartment, gorgeous yet sinister, as if a Bond villain were directing operations from the ward room. It has 28 crew to tend 16 guests. Bizarrely, it also has a helicopter on the aft deck, and that really is alarming: the chopper is retractable, and in 2007, off the Thai coast, the yacht's chief engineer, Christiaan Lentner, was crushed to death when the hatchway folded over his stomach. Six years later, his widow is still pursuing her claim, which depends on the technicality of which jurisdiction Mr Lentner died in. I wouldn't want to sail on the Ilona myself.
✒ I re-read the most famous book set on Corfu, My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell. As a boy, I thought it the funniest book I had ever encountered. And it's lasted too, so that Clare Balding could call her own recent bestseller My Animals and Other Family, assuming readers would get the reference. Durrell modestly told my friend the writer Valerie Grove that the book had "kept him in cheese". It was a huge hit and still sells today, 18 years after Durrell died (largely as the result of his alcohol intake).
But there is a puzzle. The book was published when he was 31, and it described often hilarious events that happened when he was between 10 and 14. These he can remember in the most astonishing detail: whole conversations reproduced as if verbatim, precise descriptions of how he caught the birds, snakes, toads and insects he brought home, minute by minute accounts of the mishaps the family faced. Yet he seemed to have completely forgotten that his big brother Larry (Lawrence Durrell, the novelist) didn't live with them at all, and instead had a house miles away with his wife. Many of the events described simply could not have happened, or if they did, in a very different form.
I met a charming, elderly woman who had worked with Durrell and she agreed that much of the book was fiction, or at least consisted of tiny grains of fact, puffed full of air and coated with sugar. Well, if you can't invent your own life, whose can you invent? But a little bit of my childhood died with the discovery.
✒When I feel low, like at the end of a holiday, I turn to the American website Old Jews Telling Jokes, which is exactly what it says on the web address. Here's one.
An elderly rabbi wants to try pork before he dies. But terrified that one of his flock might see him, he drives 50 miles to a posh restaurant. They offer him a whole suckling piglet, and bring it out on a silver tray with garnish and an apple in its mouth.
Just as he is about to tuck in, he is appalled to see Goldberg, the president of his congregation. But he recovers. "Hey, Goldberg, how about this restaurant? I order a baked apple, and this is how they serve it!"
Or, a guy goes into a supermarket and asks for half a lettuce. The clerk goes to the other end of the store and shouts to the supervisor: "What I do? There's an asshole here wants to buy half a lettuce!"
He turns round and, red-faced, sees that the customer has followed him down. "And this gentleman would like to buy the other half."
✒Breasts are in the news again. I hesitate to write about them, knowing the likely reaction of Guardian readers, but I must mention the helpful chart in the Daily Mail this week that depicted the cleavage of 15 female TV presenters, together with the time they appeared on screen. Only six are thought acceptable. The rough rule of thumb seems to be that the neckline may drop approximately 1.1 cm per hour of the day, but no more, so that the four inches shown by Nina Hossain at 10.30pm is still out of bounds whereas Lorraine Kelly's two inches is passable at 8.30am. What would we do without the Daily Mail's ruling on such vital topics?
✒Anna Duckworth bought a cat flap, marked: "This product will not prevent unwanted animals or people, including small children, from passing through the cat door." That must be a monstrous cat! And Roger Guedalla bought a product made in China: "This accords with green environmental protection standard, but thermostability, innocuous, invites respectfully feeling relieved about usage." It's a pair of kitchen tongs.
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