It was funny back in the day but way less funny now.

Recently I unearthed an old notebook, its pages now yellowing with age.  I once owned and used this paper jotter back in my late twenties. Back then this was my little reservoir for storing quotes, witty remarks, memorable lines of movie dialogue and other wordery bits of flotsam and jetsam I thought worthy of preserving.

As observed before on these pages, some things hold up over the passage of time better than others. Written just below an old flames’ phone number, still preserved for memories sake, was this bit of, what evidently my twenty-something self considered comedy gold –

Five things You Don’t Want When You Are A Magician

1.   When you’ve got a cold and you pull a handkerchief from your pocket but it turns        into a dove before you can use it.
2.    When the plumber says “You’re the magician.. you unclog it!”
3.    Caperash
4.    Stores that don’t accept coins taken from people’s ears.
5.    When you mistakenly murmur  ‘Abracadabra’ in your sleep and then wake up          to find half your furniture is missing.

Like I say, certain things hold up over the passage of time better than others.

In some quarters I think they call this short-term memory nostalgia.

Ps. Last week I looked at a book which uncovered the life of bestselling British author Ann Perry and the murder she was involved in as a teenage girl long before she became famous. Another well-known author Sue Townsend (1946-2014), writer of the children’s series THE DIARY OF ADRIAN MOLE, was also caught up in unfortunate events early in life. 

Back in 1953, at the age of just eight years old, Sue Townsend witnessed a child being strangled. The then Susan Johnstone had been hiding up in a tree with two other friends in a forest near her Leicester home when a scene of unbelievable horror unfolded incredibly right in front of her innocent eyes.

She and her friends watched helplessly as 12 year old Janet Warner was murdered by 31 year old Dublin born labourer Joseph Reynolds. The young girl was asphxiated with her own school tie. Afterwards, the children climbed down silently from the tree, stepping over the body, and ran to a nearby sweets shop to report the crime. The shopkeeper didn’t believe them and ordered the three out of his shop. The next day the children’s story was vindicated when police arrested Reynolds for the crime.

PPS. Hot on the heels of actor Tom Hank‘s newly penned collection of short stories titled UNCOMMON TYPE, comes a new short story collection from British author Jeffrey Archer (who famously went to prison for two years in the early 2000’s for perjury) called TELL TALE.

Archer, whose books have sold around 330 million copies worldwide, has now released a total of seven short story collections over the course of his writing career, interspersed with his more popular novels, but TELL TALE is the first in seven years.