Published at last

Last week, HK magazine interviewed Shanghai Tang founder Sir David Tang Wing-cheung. Since the interview began with Sir David saying "It's so boring doing interviews. I just want to sell my fucking book." I felt I had to write to the editors about this lapse.

After all, if you look up A Chink in the Armour on Amazon, you'll find ... Well, you won't find anything, because his book isn't listed there. But I had a feeling that he hadn't written a revision of the Kama Sutra, and besides, part of my education included the blessed Mrs Jones, part way through a history lesson, pausing, and saying:

Now girls¹, I heard some of you say earlier that you've got "fucking history". Well you haven't. You've fucking well got history.

That to the aghast gasps of a group of seventeen year olds who had perhaps never realised that adults could swear too. And correct them on their invalid usage.

It was a lesson that has stuck with me, perhaps more so than remembering what a corporatist or anarcho-syndicalist state would mean in the context of 1920s Italian politics. And thus I felt, in honour of the memory of my History teacher, that I should put pen to paper (or finger to Blackberry, but that doesn't sound quite so evocative) and point out Sir David's grammatical slip.

Plus I had a feeling that HK would probably print whatever letters anyone sends in.

And then I forgot all about it, until Saturday night when Dorsher told me I'd been published, and then today, I scampered down to Mix to pick up a copy of HK.

Only to find, as the title above my letter suggests, that perhaps the writers of HK magazine care slightly less about grammar than I do. You might almost think, given the other letters published (complaining about blatant product placement and pollution) that there were more important things to worry about than the correct insertion of "fucking" in a sentence.²

Well, really!  Perhaps I'd better write them another letter this week.

¹ for I was fortunate enough to have the benefits of a coeducational establishment.
² They could also have transcribed my email correctly: it was 'you
should either have suggested we "buy his fucking new book" or that we
"fucking well buy his new book"', and not 'you could'. Oh well, with all free magazines, you often get what you pay often.