Ata, sûlorsimavutit!
Yes, as I’m sure you know, I’m greeting you this morning with a salutation in the West Greenlandic dialect, Kalaallisut. It means “Well, now you have again relieved yourself in your trousers.”
It’s the 13th birthday of this article, you see, which points out that “Western Greenlanders must pee in their trousers an awful lot if they need so few words to describe it”.
The main point of that piece, though (and this may be especially useful to anyone who doesn’t want to either read the Spectator or negotiate the paywall), is to tell the tale of historian John Julius Norwich’s Christmas Crackers — “collection[s] of choice bits and pieces [he sent] to his friends instead of a Christmas card”.
They were, journalist Preston said,
not the sort of book that should be read on public transport by anyone fearful of making an exhibition of themselves.
Which is why I can recommend that Spectator article highly. It includes a bit of that Madonna interview where the questions were asked in Hungarian and translated into English. Her replies were translated into Hungarian, and published, and then the whole thing was translated back into English:
…which is (tragically, because I wish it was real) a fake written by Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau.
Also, I’ve never seen the phrase ‘Ata, sûlorsimavutit!’ anywhere else. Still, one of the Crackers does include this 11th century poem, which is entirely genuine, and which I will never tire of sharing, because it will never age
I recommend getting hold of any of John Julius Norwich’s other books, too. You could start, like I did, with his Short History of Byzantium, which opens with this wonderful paragraph:
…but its 400-page gallop through 1,123 years (and 18 days) of history is so good, it might make you (as it did me) want the 1,200-page three-volume work it was condensed from. And you might just want collections of silliness, in which case, abebooks is your friend.
There’s more about John Julius Norwich here — but the short version is: born into wealth and privilege, jacked in the Foreign Office to be a writer.
For me, the saddest part of that obituary is:
Accessible to all, Norwich was happy to list publicly his home address and phone number, latterly adding his e-mail address
because I rather wish I’d known that while he was alive. You may have mixed feelings about hereditary peers (I know I do), but I think the 2nd Viscount Norwich has more in the credit than the debit column. After all, you never know when you might encounter a West Greenlander who’s pissed himself, do you?
Probably a good job they wear such absorbent trousers
And finally — SOUND THE SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION KLAXON — he inspired my own silly Christmas compilation, which you may enjoy if you like random drivel (you got this far, didn’t you?)
There’ll be another next month…
