What I’d like to do today is wish a very happy 45th anniversary to this paragraph from the Edinburgh Evening News, 18 August 1978:
I could then credit the man I heard it from (one way or another): the sadly-no-longer-with-us 2nd Viscount Norwich, who used to send his friends ‘Crackers’ — booklets of trivia instead of Christmas cards:
Unfortunately, the whole thing is fiction. Whether John Julius Norwich knew this, it’s too late to find out. (He also shared the Madonna-translated-in-and-out-of-Hungarian story as fact, although that was a spoof, too.)
This story may have been invented by this man, possibly in 1987, when he had a Welsh newspaper column — which would explain why it’s so convincingly written.
…but he may just have been embellishing an existing story.
However, in excellent news, we do know that today is the 15th anniversary of the unveiling of cheese-dream-made-reality the Bronze Fonz:
…which, rather wonderfully, gave rise to the Bronze Fonz controversy of 2008, because the… ‘likeness’ made a local artist and gallery owner very angry.
(Some sources date the unveiling to 19 August, but Wikipedia says 18th, and this news story, referring to the unveiling in the past, is dated 18th.)
