Backlisted - Some Bits To Listen To While We Go On Our Holidays

Episode Date: August 21, 2017

Even your favourite podcasts need to take a holiday... but hopefully this collection of off cuts, tall tales, terrible name dropping and the occasional bit of literary chat will help tide you over until we return at the beginning of September Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. You join us in the Soho editing suite of our sponsors Unbound, the website which brings authors and readers together to create something memorable. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound.

And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And because we're all on our holidays in Wales or the British Library, but doing anything except sunning ourselves on a beach in Ibiza, we've got a slightly different show from the usual format. It might be difficult to imagine, but when we record a normal edition of Backlisted, we tend to overrun and we tend to occasionally digress. Which means, obviously, that we've got lots of juicy funny stories which

for reasons of space or timing or the poor taste of our editor fall on the cutting room floor. Yes, however as we're in a holiday mood, this is basically like the Simpsons clip show. It's like trying to, you know, do you remember John that time we talked about that book?

Do you remember that? We thought we'd stitch some of those outtakes together and we'd give you the chance to hear some of the things that didn't make the cut first time around. And so we've got some of our guests, including Kit Duvall and Rupert Thompson and Catherine Taylor. And of course, me and John. So enjoy.

Without further ado. Kit Duvall came onto the show to talk about William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow. She also spoke about the work she does in prisons, helping inmates engage with books. And also, before we get on to Maxwell, there's one other thing I'd really, really like to get on the record on this podcast, which I found totally fascinating.

When we were doing the panel about What Makes a Classic, you were talking about your work in prisons, with getting prisoners to read and engage with books. Could you just say what the books or the book is that is most likely to engage a prisoner in a British jail? I found this fascinating. Confederacy of Dunces. No.

It is absolutely... If you meet a long-term prisoner, I have to say, and they can read, and of course that is a segment of the population, that's their book. I mean, you know, you can talk to prisoners, if they're readers, they'll... Well, you won't get it out of the library because it's just gone. They'll talk about that book over and over. And the thing is, right, why I was so surprised and impressed about that is I found that quite a challenging read. So you can't underestimate or patronise anybody, can you?

I also think it's to do with the story about the book, about the writer. Because he died young. He's a loser. He's a loser. Poor old John Kennedy too. He wasn't discovered. He had this you know

difficult life and then there's this great book and it's got that sort of quirky can't swear but you know that attitude

there's attitude in the book and it's a big book and if you're doing a long time in prison you don't read the thin books you want the chunky read

you're doing your time and you can get through So Long See You Tomorrow before light out so you don't want that you want the chunky book. You're doing your time, and you can get through So Long, See You Tomorrow before light out, so you don't want that. You want the chunky book that'll last you a while. The thing that I love about that, I say this in your reading dangerously, is actually that many of the people,

I find this hilarious when you said it, because I can add a category, right? Many of the people who love A Confederacy of Dunces are, to prisoners, we can add, writers. Yes. Because there's something about the Ignatius J. Reilly character, his belief that the rest of the world are idiots, who have failed to recognise his genius.

Absolutely. Which is itself, but it's also like John Kennedy burlesquing his own frustration about not being able to get published so everyone in it is like exhilaratingly angry in that book which I can imagine really transfers

both writers and incarcerated people I mean yeah that is the best single literary fact I've heard in a long time and just really cheer me up because I love that novel. But I love that there is a theory about gout that it's all repressed rage. But that book is a sustained howl, isn't it?

Absolutely. Of the most brilliant kind. And it's also, you know, there's no self-pity in it or if in a way the self-pity is transformed into something completely completely different it's it's the self-pity is so absolute that it becomes something else yes so we were talking about um so that's a classic uh confederacy of dances and we were talking about maxwell who we are going to talk about in a minute as a classic how how did you get to the classics because i was really struck by what you were talking about that you uh have read like a lot some big old books right

i was brought up in house without books um well with two classic publications the bible and the news of the world and that is your uh that was your reading material my mother was an irish catholic turned jehovah's witness and my dad was a bus driver so he just read the news of the world Roedd hynny'n eich cyfrif darllen. Roedd fy mab yn ddiweddwr Jehovaethol Cymraeg a'i dad yn gyrff bus, felly roedd hi'n darllen y Gwyllt y Byd ac roedd fy mab yn fwyso'r Beibl arni. Rwyf wedi darllen y Beibl i gyd i gyd at leiaf tri gwaith. Gwych. Es i'r ysgol, es i'r ffwrdd pan oeddwn i'n 15 ac roedd sex, drws a chroeso a roedd yn dod i mi pan oeddwn i'n 21 neu 22 rock and roll came to when I was about 21 22 and thought not smoking anymore not taking any drugs not drinking what can I do I know I'll read so I went to I got some recommendations from my boss

at the time who's a lawyer and he's I said give me just give me books, just any 10 books. And he was an army man. So he gave me The Siege of Krishnapur, Three Men in a Boat, The Riddle of the Sands. Oh, Riddle of the Sands. We've done Riddle of the Sands on this podcast. He just gave me these 10 books. But in there, and I love those books. I mean, no problem at all reading them. But in there was Madame Bovary.

Wow. And in there was Therese Raquin. And lots of others. And in there was Therese Raquin and lots of others. And I was off. So I read those ten and I went back and back and back to Dillon's, as it was then, and just bought the Black Penguin Spines. Just next Black Spine, next Black Spine, until I felt I'd done that a couple of hundred books later probably.

That's so brilliant. I moved, I discovered, discovered vintage the pale blue green modern classics modern classics penguin probably penguin yeah penguin modern classics 20th century classics that's right so then it was graham green oh my god i was in heaven arnold bennett um patrick hamilton and i just devoured those books yeah and so by 97, because that was if I started when I was 21, that was 1981. So by 97, I think I'd done quite a lot of reading.

And I came across the Americans. I didn't get to the Americans because I was reading the French and the English. And then it was Henry James and blah, blah, blah. And I came across William Maxwell. And I am amazed. I didn'n sylweddol. Dwi ddim yn gwybod ei fod wedi cael ei gyhoeddi yn 1980. Dwi ddim wedi gwneud hynny o ran ei darllen, oherwydd dwi ddim wedi gwblhau'r ffront.

Dwi ddim wedi gwneud hynny oherwydd dwi ddim wedi gwblhau'r ffront. Dwi ddim wedi gwneud hynny oherwydd dwi ddim wedi gwblhau'r ffront. Roeddwn i'n ddweud mai dyma'r llyfr yw'r 1940au a'r 1950au. Roeddwn i'n sylweddol oherwydd pan fyddwch yn gofyn i mi, un clasig oedd yn gofyn i mi, byddwn i ddim yn dweud bod llyfr wedi cael ei ddysgu yn 1980. because when you asked me a forgotten classic, I wouldn't even say a book written in 1980, you know, qualified because it's just not old enough, which is why I said that and it's a mystery to me that I thought it was... Well, it's not a mystery, I understand.

I just want to commend you on the phrase Henry James and blah, blah, blah. Because... I didn't like it. I didn't like Emma James at all. Chewy, I think we'd have to say. Have you carried on reading geographically? So have you gone through kind of like Russian authors? I did some Russia and Poland. I didn't do much of Scandinavian countries.

And Italy passed me by. I didn't do Italy. Nor much of Spain. And I haven't done a lot of South America. I've done bits, obviously, but I didn't do Italy. I don't know. Nor much of Spain. And I haven't done a lot of South America. I've done bits, obviously, but I couldn't say, like, France really got me. It's absolutely brilliant. But also, I was just thinking

Alan Lane, you know. That was that sense of a whole education that was accessible to everybody. He accomplished that for me. You know, and I think he did for millions of people as well. There was a wonderful thing I learned this week that in the week that it was published,

the Yves Ruhr translation of The Odyssey was outselling. It was number one bestseller in the paperback. It was outselling everything else. There was that fantastic moment. I think it was a review of Pevsner saying there was a sort this post-war moment when actually the excitement that people could educate themselves

and that classics were there It's such a great story Over the last two years we've had some rather strange memes that keep popping up and off-the-cuff remarks that strike a chord with members of the backlisted family Can I call you that? I think I can.

Anyway, one of these recurring themes, possibly because of the show we did on All the Devils Are Here by David Seabrook, is slightly dilapidated English seaside towns. Here's Andy explaining more. Well, before I tell you what I've been reading this week, I need to update you on an important matter pertaining to our last podcast, our Patrick Hamilton extravaganza ultimate backlisted TM. With an additional pod for those of you... Yeah, yeah.

So good, we had to record more than we... Available right now. So you might recall at the beginning of the last episode, I related a true story about seeing the actor Peter O'Toole launching his autobiography at an event at the Grand Hotel in Eastbourne 20 years ago

where he was asked how do you write your books? And he replied, I use a pen and a piece of bloody paper. That was the end of the Q&A. Well, somebody was listening to that and I had a message this week from Jonathan Main who runs the brilliant

independent bookshop in South London Bookseller Crow and he sent me this message which I'm going to read out verbatim because it really made me laugh he said just listen to Hamilton podcast I too was at the O'Toole breakfast in Eastbourne

and can confirm your story. He was smoking using a long cigarette holder and he was wearing a cape. My friend Stephen and I were staying at an old hotel on Eastbourne seafront. It had a rickety old lift with the old iron concertina gates that ran down the middle of it. The night before the breakfast, we had been out late

and, returning to the hotel, found the doors locked. It took us some time to raise the night porter, who appeared at the door in a panic, opened it, and ran back towards the lift, shouting, She's gone! She's gone! Whereupon, much to our pissed bemusement, the lift creaked downwards, the gates pulled back, and a recently deceased old woman was wheeled out on a gurney.

Just thought you might appreciate, Jay. So thank you, Jonathan, for both confirming my story and one of you. That must have been a Booksellers Association conference, wasn't it? It was, yeah, yeah, it was the BA conference. I think I was at that conference as well, but sadly not at the Petro Tool launch. Great idea for a book launch outfit for me, actually. I'm just thinking a cape and a long cigarette holder.

It's never a bad look, surely. The critic and writer Catherine Taylor chose Vladimir Nabokov's, or Nabokov's, the gift to talk about when she came on Backlisted a few months ago. There was so much in the book that we didn't manage to get on to the rich topic of the various letters Nabokov sent to agents, acquaintances and the like. Here's some of the stuff we had to leave out. We must also stress Nabokov's humour. The humour in the book and the humour in everything Nabokov did is very, very present. Proper wit. very very present and um proper wit i've got a letter here that he wrote to his new york agent

alta gracia de janelli in 1938 and she was attempting to place translation rights in dar the gift and dimitri navikov describes her as the most energetic of a platoon of agents who homed in on vN after Laughter in the Dark. And this is in response, Nabokov wrote this letter in response to a reader's report, which the reader's report has been lost,

but we have the letter. Okay, we have the letter. Here we go. It's a Nabokov novel. Dear Mr. Gianelli, I am writing from a small mountain resort. I mean, that's pure's pure kinboat right there.

Anyway, I am writing from a small mountain resort. On the whole, I rather liked N's description of the gift, although it is very superficial. There is a lot more in my book both for the connoisseur and the lay reader. Here are some objections. The gift is thoroughly realistic, as it tells the story of a definite person, showing his physical existence and the development of his inner self.

As he is an author, I naturally show his literary progress. Moreover, the whole story is threaded on my hero's love romance, with the underground work of fate revealed, an essential point which N has entirely missed. My style and methods have nothing, italics, in common with Joyce, though I greatly appreciate Ulysses. The novel is not, quotes, a crazy quilt of bits. It is a logical sequence of psychological events.

The movements of stars may seem crazy to the simpleton, but wise men know that comets come back. Whoa. and as samples are given of all my hero's literary production, it would have been an impossible omission to leave his chief book out. Moreover, at this point, my hero's interpretation of Chernyshevsky's life, which incidentally took me four years to write, lifts my novel to a wider plane, lending it an epic note and, so to say, spreading my hero's individual butter over the bread of a whole epoch. In this work, Chernyshevsky's life,

the defeat of Marxism and materialism is not only made evident, but it is rounded out by my hero's artistic triumph. As to the interest which the gift might represent to the foreign American reader, I want to repeat that I know how to translate the book in such a way as to even avoid the necessity of footnotes. Human interest means Uncle Tom's cabin to me, or Galsworthy's drivel, and makes me sick. Sea sick.

Your faith in my work is of the greatest value to me, and I thank you warmly for your kind words. Yours very truly, Reverend Abacus. Isn't that wonderful? I love it. There was another interview, just in case we got time, about the modern world, which, you know, he doesn't use phrases like modern world to Nabokov.

He'll obscure you. So when he comes, I love this. What I feel to be the real modern world is the world the artist creates, his own mirage, which becomes a new mere world in Russian. By the very act of his shedding, as it were, the age he lives in, my mirage is produced in my private desert, an arid but ardent place with the sign

No Caravans Allowed on the trunk of a lone pine palm. Arid or ardent. Oh, yes, very good. I know, no caravans allowed.. Oh, yes, very good. I know. No caravans. Sorry. This is too good.

We could go... So much more to say. We could have. We've got so much more. We haven't got on to Poshlost at all, which is huge and important. I didn't mention it in my tweet. Huge and important. Do you want to say what it is?

Go on. You've got one line. Go on. Fundamental concept in Navikov, isn't it? The thing that he kind of writes as it were against. Well, it's posh lust, but he refers to it as posh lust because he was a great punner. And it's about the phony and the vulgar.

And it's deeply kind of, it's a very Russian concept. It's one of those fairly untranslatable Russian words which we're now actually trying to translate for the sake of this programme. Mae'n un o'r geiriau Rwytiaethau yn ddim yn cael ei ddysgu. Rydyn ni'n ceisio ei ddysgu ar hyn o bryd. Mae'r gweithwyr yn defnyddio ysgrifennu. Mae'r gweithwyr yn cael eu defnyddio. Mae'r gweithwyr yn cael eu defnyddio. Mae'r gweithwyr yn cael eu defnyddio. Mae'r gweithwyr yn cael eu defnyddio. banality of writing it's it's the sort of it's kind of critical banality as well all of those

kind of you know people who call things extraordinary and remarkable on podcasts like that kind of awesome or um that it his whole life was lived against that the reductive wanting to be able to reduce thing he was about making things more complex and patterns. He did not suffer the lazy reader. He did not suffer the lazy reader. As we have said on this podcast all the time. But I love the idea that he was looking... You know how you tell a butterfly, a new species of butterfly,

is to examine with a microscope its genitalia? And that's what he was... You were talking about the amazing Nabokov's Butterflies book. That's right. The sketches. And all his novels were written in pencils. And that's what he was... You were talking about the amazing Nabokov's Butterflies book, the sketches. And all his novels were written in pencils. And also he used index cards. And in fact, Theodore in the book,

obviously he uses index cards to write his book too. This is the bit that I put in the Year of Reading Dangerously from lectures on Russian literature. I may, if I am lucky, tap the deep pathos that pertains to all authentic art because of the breach between its eternal values and the sufferings of a muddled world. This world, indeed, can hardly be blamed for regarding literature as a luxury or a toy unless it can be used as an up-to-date guidebook.

As is usual on Backlisted, we're going to pause now for a moment to let an author from the Unbound Stable tell you about their latest book. In this episode, it's Martin Fitzgerald, the author of Ruth and Martin's Album Club. My name is Martin Fitzgerald, and I am the author of a book called Ruth and Martin's Album Club. And Ruth and Martin's Album Club is a book, formerly a blog, where we would make famous-ish people listen to albums that they'd never heard before.

We started the project, I guess, with just some friends of mine and some journalists. Started the project, I guess, with just some friends of mine and some journalists. And within 18 months, it became relatively popular to the point where something that started out as a hobby for me, and I guess a little bit of a time suck in sort of evenings and weekends, ended up with us making, you know, J.K. Rowling listen to the first Violent Femmes album. We also had politicians. We had Tim Farron listening to NWA. We had a guy from the House of Lords listening to Public Enemy.

And we were interested. It was a kind of antidote to a thousand and one albums you must listen to before you die. I've never really understood that sentiment. Ruth is a real person. I saw her about an hour ago, actually, and she's fine. There were lots of people that really didn't like the albums that they ended up listening to, but it was all done in an overall spirit of that doesn't really matter. There's no right or wrong here. So what I would hope that people got from the book is that just sense of fun, that it doesn't matter, because it doesn't.

Every album that we did, I really liked. But I didn't mind when someone didn't like the album, as long as they made me enjoy them not liking it. So I want people to laugh at the book. I want people to be interested. A big part of the book is the stories of these artists. And what I've tried to do there is to not cover old ground and not do music journalism in inverted commas.

I've tried to tell adventure stories because I think that all of these bands or singers, whether it's Elvis or Kendrick Lamar, if you tell them from the point of view of before those people made it, they are adventures and they're funny and strange things happen and yes you can talk about recording techniques and you can talk about the summer of love and you can talk about doing a complicated album on a four-track recorder or you can say paul mccartney was 24 when he did sergeant pepper that's kind of mad

isn't it because that's now seen as vintage and progressive and classic. But he was like a kid. That's weird. I tried to tell the stories with a sort of lightness, and I think the guests had a sort of lightness to it too. So I would want people to read it and maybe check out the albums if they wanted to that would be good but mainly people just to read it and and to smile and to realize that you can take music seriously by not being serious about music sometimes Ruth and Martin's Album Club by Martin Fitzgerald is available to

order now from all good bookshops or from the Unbound website, unbound.com. Backlisted listeners can get a discount by putting in the code BACKOFF, that's B-A-C-K-O-F-F, at checkout. We've talked about books enough, now for some capitalism. After that short interlude, we continue to rummage amongst the offcuts from the past editions, and we return once more, perhaps inevitably, to Eastbourne where no doubt one day we shall all retire. It turns out that the novelist Rupert Thompson is a product of that town as he explained when he came in to do the podcast.

So I may have just like... So my mum lives in Bexhill. Yeah. And has lived in Bexhill for 27 years. She moved to Bexhill 27 years ago. Is the Curzon in Eastbourne, is that, it may not still be there,

is that the cinema that's near the Arndale Centre? It's on Seaside, which is, no, it's sort of the east end of Eastbourne towards the, East end. Towards the Crumbles. Yes, the Crumbles indeed.

It's down that way. Is that the name for people who live in Eastbourne towards the... The East End. Towards the crumbles. Yes, the crumbles indeed. It's down that way. Is that the name for people who live in Eastbourne? This is becoming a regular Eastbourne podcast. I told a story last time about seeing Peter O'Toole... In Eastbourne? In Eastbourne at the Booking Association Conference. Shabby English seaside towns. There's a really famous...

One of the famous things I used to hear growing up was that Roger Moore lived in Eastbourne. You know, because there's one high-rise building in Eastbourne called South Cliff Tower or something. And he apparently had the penthouse in that. Does that apparently... We have no way of verifying that. Let's just assume that that's true.

It's a lovely idea. Lovely thought. That will pe assume that that's true. It's a lovely idea. Lovely thought. Pep up all visits to home. I can feel horrible psychageography project kind of emerging, can't you? It's sort of a kind of benign octogenarian version of All the Devils Are Here set in Eastbourne. Well, it's not that nasty a place. People are mostly very nice here.

Or a book called Mr Bond I assume where you travel to towns where you've heard that Roger Moore might live as a way of exploring memory what is it about films it's just because that All the Devils Are Here the David Seabrook book which we did

one of our favourite podcasts we've done last year is all about Charles Hortry plays a kind of sinister central role in that. Who lived and very much died in a deal. And then Whitstable, your own hometown. Peter Cushing. Indeed. I mean, Peter Cushing lives in

Whitstable. He buys vegetables on a bicycle. It was a song. Was it? Yeah, have you never heard? How's that go? Peter Cushing lives in Whitstableable he buys vegetables on a bicycle on his bicycle it honestly if you've never seen it really comes alive i think it's called peter cushing lives on we used to have it on the qi website i'll find it for you well i somebody out there will know this this episode is taking on unexpected new shapes and directions.

Back in the mists of time, Andy and myself both worked for our sins in the book selling trade. When William Fiennes came in recently to talk about Paula Fox, the conversation got onto the kind of events that we used to attend back in the last century. I don't really go to these anymore, but in the 90s, I used to attend in my capacity as first a bookseller and then someone who worked at Waterstones head office and then a publisher, author dinners. Do they still have author dinners? Well, we do, yeah. I mean, dinners where authors attend.

Not quite in the same way, I think. Yeah, in the 90s, what they used to do was they used to have they ever thrown one of these for you will you no i think i missed the um i mean i've been some some lunch and a few lunches around what they used to do was if an author had a had a book coming out then the publisher would book a restaurant in the evening and they'd invite booksellers and people from trade magazines and whatever from around London there'd be about 15 of you there'd be you and there'd be June from the Pan Bookshop and there'd be somebody from Books Etc and what have you and there'd be this this I now realize poor author and I used to work for a great

man called Dane Howell, who was the manager of the shop, Kensington High Street, Waterstones. And if he was invited to one of these dinners, he would often send one of us in his stead if he couldn't go or didn't want to go. He was just one of the great booksellers of all time. And so I used to go to quite a few of these dinners. They weren't always great social events, was my memory. But partly that was the fault of us, you know.

That was partly our fault. I remember I went to, I won't say who this was, but I went to one author dinner for quite a famous author where I'd had a very long day at the shop and I'd been out the night before. And they read extensively from their new... I fell asleep at the shop and I've been out the night before and they read extensively from their new I fell asleep at the table and and and I have the copy of the book that they signed to me and when I opened it it said you know dear Andy thank you for your close attention it's so humiliating

I mean so humiliating but I but I know I know it's terrible, isn't it? It's terrible. I keep it as a reminder, you know, that you should behave yourself properly. I once went to a dinner somewhere in Chelsea. I can't even remember where this was. It was for the publication of Sir Roy Strong's Diaries. And it was when I was at head office. And so it was a dinner for about, it was like a dozen people tops. And I really like Sir Roy Strong.

He is a very intelligent and entertaining. Brilliant storyteller. He's a brilliant storyteller. And he went round the table, he did a thing after dinner, he went round the table and he said to each person, and who are you and where do you work? And what have you got?

He got to me and he said, and who do we have here? This young gentleman who looks like a cross between Keats and the young Mick Jagger. Clearly, this was some time ago. Now that I look like Mick Jagger as he looks now and Keats as he looks now but um but that was really really fun that was really really nice that was for his diaries

from the 60s to the to the late 80s I'm waiting for the publication of his diaries for the period in question to see if there's a mention of Keaton McJagger. But I also, in 1997, I sat next to the Doctor Who actor Tom Baker at a Waterstones managers conference. And it was

to tie in with the publication of his memoir Who on Earth is Tom Baker? And now Tom Baker, my absolute childhood hero as dr who and and you know i there are many many good tom baker stories but i so i one of which is some of them yeah tom tom very much then and presumably still does have liked to like to drink and so i sat next to tom throughout the dinner i we ate and we drank and it was a great highlight of my

life let alone career and towards the end of the meal Tom Baker turned to me and he said you're a very good looking boy I said thanks very much Tom yes you're a very good-looking boy.

And then he looked at me and he said, but what will you do when your looks fade? And I should have said, you know, appear regularly in a non-visual medium. As well as chatting about books, writing, writers, and occasionally when we've finished, we retire to the pub and chat about other stuff. As this is a kind of summer special we'll leave you with a cautionary tale of why you should always wear footwear when swimming in the southern seas. We hope you enjoy

the show. We'll be back in a couple of weeks with a more regular edition. Goodbye. So this is yeah this right up there with bad holiday stories, bad holidays I've lived through. It was actually a wonderful place to be. I was on the island of Rarotonga in the Cook Islands with my family, and I was finishing, as traditionally I was doing on holidays, I was finishing a book, which was the first draft of the second book of General Ignorance, a QI book, so I'd spent basically all week researching.

Amazing, there was quite good internet out there, researching stuff and writing up these ridiculous questions that you think you know the answers to but don't. The last day, I'd sent it off, and I was able to tell the boys that finally I was going to be able to go out snorkelling with them, and having been kind of absolutely on top of them all week long, telling them to wear reef shoes, I thought I'd go and have a snorkel.

I went and had a snorkel. We had a great time. I had a sort of morning ritual. I always used to like to go and find a blue starfish. That's why there's a blue starfish on my phone. Incredibly beautiful things. And sort of weird blue things are odd in nature. Found a blue starfish and then just landed gently on the sea floor,

felt a little prick, and then just sort of swam back, was casually in there. The prick got worse and worse, and by the time I'd actually got back, it was actually really quite sore. And my brother noticed that. He said, you're limping. I said, I don't know, I might have stood on something. And he said, well, are you sure you didn't stand on uh something really dangerous i said what's the chances of that but he'd been in the water for 20 minutes anyway uh to cut a long story short about half an hour

later i was in severe agony and starting to uh start really starting to sweat and feeling like i was about to pass out so we drove to the hospital uh there's one hospital in the uh in the main drag of rarotonga and got there and by this stage i was i was really starting to panic because it occurred to me that i probably had stood on something and the thing that you all dread to stand on is the stonefish the legendary stonefish yeah so i go i'm being very english i go up to the counter and say i appear to have stood on something in the reef and the woman said it was very relaxed, she said, oh go on, sit down don't be worried, you'll be fine

and Rachel's saying, I don't think he's going to be fine, he doesn't look fine to me and she said, well he stood on a stonefish What kind of pain? The pain is a very, very intense pain in the puncture wound that you can feel but it just, it gets worse

and worse and worse. I mean, it's incredibly sharp. And I mean, you do start to, I mean, I was starting to really find it difficult to remain conscious. Partly shock, I suspect. So not nice. None of this is good. Anyway, she says, I'll go and see if I can find the doctor.

Rachel said, the doctor doctor isn't this a hospital anyway i was by this stage the only thing i could do i was sort of hopping around trying to you know kind of and i saw a guy in scrubs and he said oh no it's all right the doctor will be through i saw the doctor the doctor looked at my foot he listened to the story and he said ah he said yeah he said i've got some good news and some bad news i said well what's the good news he said you're not going to die. It's only one spine. He said, we had a kid last year, you know, three spines.

Had to chop his foot off. I said, okay, that's good. I said, what's the bad news? He said, you see, you know what to do with a stonefish. You've got to get hot water on it. Get hot water on it. Kills the toxin. But he said, you must.

I said, yeah, it was about an hour ago. He said, yeah, I'm going to have to inject it with an anti-necrotic. And I said, you know what that is? I said, well, I know what anti means and I know what necros means. He said, yeah, you see, the toxin kills the skin, so I have to stop that.

So I said, fine. And he said, well, where do you have to inject it? In the puncture wound. So I'm on the thing with the gut i mean my brother had to hold me down and it was it was like a horse syringe you know horse tranquilizer it was a massive bloody thing uh incredibly painful and then he said you're fine i'll give you some conine go and have a beer enjoy your last night on the island so i did i sort of sat there with my foot in a bucket kind of in a in a lovely opiate haze, drinking beer.

Unfortunately, the next day on the plane on the way back, I noticed that my leg had started to swell. And by the time we arrived in Queenstown in New Zealand, where we were supposed to be going skiing, I mean, it was like massive, my leg. And I got off the plane. I hadn't seen my daughter for two years. And the first thing we said is,

we've got to go to the doctor. What's wrong with Dad? He stood on a stonefish and it's gone wrong. So anyway, it turned out that I had a New Zealand, very brusque New Zealand doctor said, ah yeah, stonefish. She said, we don't get many tropical fish injuries up here in the mountains.

It's normally people breaking their legs skiing. She said, yeah, but she said, that's cellulitis. I said, that's what? Well, she said, what did you do after the doctor had died? And I said, put my bucket of water. Bucket of water? A bucket of water, I mean, what, full of germs? You've got, the wound's infected.

And then she got a biro and she drew a line around my thigh. And I said, what are you what are you doing that for she said well that's where the infection's got to and i said well what happens she said well if it gets to your heart you die oh is it likely to well that's i'm about to give you a bloody large dose of antibiotics to stop it so another bloody great syringe pumps that in and then she said right now you're not allowed to drink you're not allowed to and i said i said what what antibiotic was that i'd just written a question for qi about you know can you drink and have antibodies it turns out you can drink with almost

all there's two antibiotics of the hundred that are available that react badly with alcohol so i i vouched safe this information ah she said smart ass right okay yes you can i said well i've come here to drink wine with my best friend i haven't seen him for 10 years it's central otago pinot noirs i want to drink them she's all right she said you can have a drink as long as you keep your foot above your heart and if you can find a bar in queenstown that will serve you good luck to you anyway cut about an hour later and there i was with my foot on a bar i managed to arrange a stool with a large glass of peanut everybody who came into the bar was saying stonefish anyway the coda to the story is on the way back we stopped in hong kong and i by this stage i'd

researched stonefish to death and i discovered that there were Hong Kongs that specialised in stonefish at restaurants in Hong Kong that specialised in stonefish. So we found one and I got to choose my stonefish, that little bastard at the back, and they served it stonefish three-way, which was brilliant. The whole, we managed to consume everything, the bones and everything, it was really satisfying.

But yeah, I mean, just wear roof shoes if you find yourself in trouble too. If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early, you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call Locklisted, which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films

we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.