(no subject)

[johnny9fingers]

Whilst in my local bookshop, buying the new Iain M. Banks novel




I saw a collection of Auberon Waugh's journalism, called 'Kiss me Chudliegh'





I quote from his Wikipedia entry:

During his National Service, he was commissioned into the Royal Horse Guards and served in Cyprus, where he was almost killed in a machine gun accident. Annoyed by a fault in the machine gun on his armoured car which he drove frequently, he seized the end of the barrel and shook it, accidentally triggering the mechanism so that the gun fired several bullets through his chest. As a result of his injuries, he lost his spleen, one lung, several ribs, and a finger, and suffered from pain and recurring infections for the rest of his life. While lying on the ground waiting for an ambulance he said to his platoon sergeant, with his characteristic élan: "Kiss me Chudleigh". He later recalled, however, that "Chudleigh did not recognise the allusion and from then on treated me with extreme caution."

I have all the collections of Waugh's journalism anyway, so I probably won't be buying it: but I will recommend it to all and sundry without hesitation. Waugh was a great Englishman, a good Catholic (though such might have been thought to be mutually exclusive), and the wittiest and most vicious polemicist I can recall. His politics were much different to mine, but still....

I should go and put a rose on his grave sometime.