One of the less-discussed advantages of e-books

[commodorified]

Is that when reading on a tablet one may easily look slightly puzzling things up as curiosity strikes, rather than being entirely dependent on working them out from whatever context is available.

I do not say that I have lost anything much over the last thirty years by supposing, from time to time and while reading novels set in the UK, that The Pink 'Un was a periodical concerned with the raising and marketing of pigs, which I worked out contained also, perhaps, humourous essays and some cartoons, but I am pleased to report that I am now, at least on this minor point, Enlightened, even as I gently mourn my innocent, imaginary monthly porcine publication, and the cheery cover illustrations I had mentally provided it with.

Comments

[jesuswasbatman]

The Norwich football magazine isn't in fact the famous "Pink 'Un", but was named after it. The one mentioned in literature is the Sporting Times, a specialist sports (and especially horse-racing) newspaper published from 1865 to 1932.

[legionseagle]

I am heartbroken! It should so definitely have been so. With an occasional indignant Letter to the Editor signed "Emsworth".

[legionseagle]

If Wikipedia is to be believed, this is how the original Pink 'Un reviewed Ulysses:

[It] appears to have been written by a perverted lunatic who has made a speciality of the literature of the latrine... I have no stomach for Ulysses... James Joyce is a writer of talent, but in Ulysses he has ruled out all the elementary decencies of life and dwells appreciatively on things that sniggering louts of schoolboys guffaw about. In addition to this stupid glorification of mere filth, the book suffers from being written in the manner of a demented George Meredith. There are whole chapters of it without any punctuation or other guide to what the writer is really getting at. Two-thirds of it is incoherent, and the passages that are plainly written are devoid of wit, displaying only a coarse salacrity [sic] intended for humour.

If you add the line, "I would not allow my Gloucester Old Spots to have their troughs wiped out with this filth" it would fit very nicely into your Platonic Ideal Pig Pink 'Un.

[clanwilliam]

I am enchanted at the idea of the Pink Un as a porcine periodical and, remembering a mention in one of the Holmes stories, am now convinced that pig farmers are all hardened gamblers.

[glinda]

I hadn't previously encountered it, but I too would have greatly preferred a gentle periodical about pigs with occassional humourous essays and some slightly ribald cartoons...