warm weather at wrong time of year: how annoying!

While you're basking in some of the highest temperatures ever seen at the beginning of October, spare a thought for the hapless clothing manufacturers. Poor things! Just as they launch their autumn and winter collections onto the high street, the punters are looking, not for coats and corduroys, but shorts and sandals. My God! This may mean a loss of profits for them of anything up to, ooh, 1%. I swear if they could make it rain or snow right now they would. But their shareholders shouldn't worry too much. The Indian summer (and screw the PC brigade, who have nonsensically branded the term racist) is due to fizzle out by the middle of next week, and then Primark, Peacocks and the rest can go back to making money like they're used to.

LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

I am working on my autobiography at the moment, and as I am currently writing about my childhood I have devoted some time to recalling the books that I enjoyed in those far off days. Chief among them were the exploits of the fat owl of the remove, Billy Bunter, created by Frank Richards (real name Charles Hamilton). Set in a minor public school, Greyfriars, the books conjured a disappeared world where England ruled the waves and where decency and "playing the game" ruled in the classroom. It was an easy, comfortable and secure world to enter, and the skill of Richard's writing was to welcome you in in such a way you almost felt you were one of the "Famous Five" yourself. Sure each book would usually feature some sort of bad apple, but he was always vanquished or reformed by the end.

Hamilton wrote hundreds of books based on this formula and was also the principle writer for the famous "penny dreadfuls" of the early 20th century, "The Gem" and "The Magnet". It seems almost impossible for one person to have written all this, and indeed George Orwell in his famous essay, "Boy's Weeklys", believed there must have been a team working under Hamilton's supervision. There wasn't. It was all him. At his peak, he was churning out anything up to 80,000 words a week, and in his lifetime he is estimated to have written 100 million words, placing him as the most prolific writer (for whom a word count has been established) who has ever lived. Or was he?
In my 1965 edition of the Guinness Book of Records, the actual award should go to the 16th century Spanish writer Lope Felix de Vega Carpio. Known to his contemporaries as "the Phoenix of Wit", and familiar to Samuel Pepys, who attended readings of his tranlslated works, he was responsible for:
"...About 1800 comedies (of which only 470 survive), 400 autos sacrimentares, 2 novels and an immense amount of poetry."
Take that, Charles Hamilton!