{"id":845,"date":"2007-12-27T19:51:45","date_gmt":"2007-12-27T18:51:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dickonedwards.co.uk\/diary\/index.php\/archive\/christmas-howlers\/"},"modified":"2007-12-27T19:56:55","modified_gmt":"2007-12-27T18:56:55","slug":"christmas-howlers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/archive\/christmas-howlers\/","title":{"rendered":"Christmas Howlers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>John Julius Norwich&#8217;s <em>Christmas Cracker<\/em> is an annual selection of quotes and clippings from his commonplace book. He prints it up as a thin, elegant booklet and distributes it to the counters of a few London bookshops (Daunts, Waterstones Piccadilly).<\/p>\n<p>From the latest <em>Cracker<\/em>, here&#8217;s some &#8216;howlers&#8217; found in school compositions. They made me laugh a little too loudly in public places, so be warned.<\/p>\n<p><em>John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind from a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>John Julius Norwich&#8217;s Christmas Cracker is an annual selection of quotes and clippings from his commonplace book. He prints it up as a thin, elegant booklet and distributes it to the counters of a few London bookshops (Daunts, Waterstones Piccadilly). From the latest Cracker, here&#8217;s some &#8216;howlers&#8217; found in school compositions. They made me laugh [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=845"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/845\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dickonedwards.com\/diary\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}