OK so Mt Whitney’s ever so photogenic at the moment, but just wait a couple of million years or so and see what it looks like then!

Though looking at Ben Nevis I do rather take your point. At a guess I’d say everywhere in Denver’s higher than Loch Ness.

“Ooh, the highest mountain in Britain is 4400 feet!”

Mount Whitney (compare THAT to your precious Ben Nevis, all soft and round and cuddly) in the Sierra Nevada (the highest point in the continental US) is 14,505 feet! And Donner Pass is 7,000 feet!

So thbbbpt!

None of the others I’ve read.

Favourite novel is Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, much the best novel to have come out of the Second World War. It has some of the funniest scenes in English, but is best read as an extended meditation on how one faces up to a growing realisation of the fact of God’s love.

My favourite Mark Twain is Huckleberry Finn. I didn’t read it until just a few years ago, so there I was crammed full of all sorts of stuff about technique and diction acquired over the years. Went just dandy for the first couple pages, then I started reading the book for the plot, and caring about the characters, just wanting to know what would happen next, completely lost to the book. When I put the light out I lay there in the dark, just worried stiff about what happened next, and not a thought to authorial technique. Hadn’t had so much fun in years. Sheer delight.

It strikes me that the Waugh book is a trilogy and I might be accused of cheating. If so, Huck Finn shares top billing with Kingsley Amis’s “The Green Man” which is about a publican with a complex personal life who’s on two bottles of whisky a day and starts seeing ghosts. Or thinks he does. It contains a wonderful scene where Our Lord comes to the pub give him some friendly advice about how to handle things. He also points out that, contrary to modern liberal thought, He can come down pretty bloody hard on people who misbehave. It also has a lovely early-Seventies version of a trendy vicar, which may or may not have been based on Simon Schama.

Here endeth the book club.

Oh, yeah, I guess they all were Victoria licenses. Didn’t think of that. But, and I thought I had a hard time getting carded.

Man squinting at driver’s license

“…”

Man still squinting at driver’s license

“… [to friends] I know! They never see it first thing!”

Still squinting, but checks the back, to no avail

“Um…”

Looks doubtfully at me, obviously deciding it’s a fake license

“It’s those numbers, right there, in red, actually… Yeah, right there, the bright red ones. Red. See? Red? Bright red?” [muttering] “if i was gonna fake a license, you think i’d fake a california one with a magnetic strip on the back?”

But with them, it was all of that, but with these BIG FRIENDLY NUMBERS all over the back, and they still couldn’t see it.

That big DOB on the license must be a Victorian thing, because NSW only has a little date in the corner on the front.