By Mike Gayle

This looks like chick-lit. I mean, consider that this was the first sight I had of it:

So there was no reason in the world for me to look at it, right? Yet I read the thing in two days …

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Creativity astounds me. So do things that seem so obvious that you have to ask yourself “Why didn’t someone think of that before?!”

That’s the thought that entered my head the second I encountered a two-in-one ketchup and mustard. I’ve elected to refer to it as metchup, casting kustard to one side for obvious reasons.

Metchup!

An unusual title and worthy of a little elaboration, methinks.

I was looking for a play on words that would wittily lead into a post on irrational things I’ve seen lately on eBay. There was an Ebay-based pun that jumped out at me, but I’m going to save that for a rant post, should I ever need to write one.

The phrase is a rip-off of irrational exuberance, a throw-away remark once made in the middle of a speech by Alan Greenspan, head of the Federal Reserve. Those two little words illustrated the influence that the world’s foremost economist possessed; no sooner had he said them, the stock market slumped, financial-sector workers latching onto them and taking heed of his warning and causing a slowdown in what had been a booming economy. Whoops.

Well, I’ve been privy to some irrational behaviour on eBay lately. The tie-in with economics writes itself too, since it’s clearly boom behaviour.

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This was the first of the prequels but was later prequelled itself. It makes sense to me.

The Sharpe series originally began in 1981 with Sharpe’s Eagle, set during the Talavera campaign of July 1809. More books followed in sequence up to 1814 (still a year away from Waterloo) until a change occurred in 1998, when Cornwell wrote a book set a few months before the initial one that kickstarted the series. This is that book.

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By C. J. Sansom

I tell you, C. J. Sansom stumbled on greatness when he came up with the idea of his Shardlake books, as did I when I chanced upon one in a discount bookstore and purchased it.

The premise is simple; somebody should have done this years ago. He has his version of Hercule Poirot, Matthew Shardlake. Whereas Poirot is a dandified, short Belgian with a distinctive upturned moustache and persistant stomach ailments, Shardlake is a self-conscious hunchback with anti-Papist beliefs. The real genius, however, is that he lives during the reign of King Henry VIII. There’s so much to play around with, a rich tapestry of history to weave during a time of great turbulence in England.

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About, oh, six years ago, I set up a Yahoo! email account. I already had one, now inactive, but it had something of a jokey name. I was living in France in that summer of 2002 and was scheduled to be heading home soon. I made the decision to have an email address that featured my name rather than a gimmick, and so came into being my principal email addy.

I don’t recall ever having had a problem with it until earlier this week. For a period of a couple of days I couldn’t log in. Every attempt to do so would take me from the log-in screen to the, erm, log-in screen again.

Seemingly as soon as the problem reached the point when I was using GooglePower~! to try resolving it, it sorted itself out.

With one slight problem.

Now, every time I go to check my email, this is what greets me:

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As is part of the routine, I had my adorable nephew this morning. I’ve already blogged about how having him with me seems to gain me a little respect, and today was more of the same.

This is the third time that the little man has been to visit my workplace, and he’s now on familiar terms with a couple of the ladies in it. He has the same good taste as me; his favourite is my favourite too, Janjan. He was playing with her stuffed sheep, Shaggy.

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By Robert Harris

If ever a film sold a book, this would be it for me. The most obvious counterfactual to people from the western world, I would think, is to imagine the global landscape had Hitler emerged from the ruins of WW2 victorious.

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By C J Sansom

A new author to me. I’d picked up his book Sovereign with which I had quickly become enamoured, and I resolved to work through his others in short order.

Winter In Madrid is the only one that Sansom has written so far that stands alone; it’s not set in the times of Henry VIII like his others. This one occurs in Spain during its civil war, its roots lying in a military uprising funded by Juan March in 1936.

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