An Audience With An Elephant: And Other Encounters On The Eccentric Side (2003) - Plot & Excerpts
This is a collection of short essays by Welsh journalist Byron Rogers, previously published in various British newspapers and magazines up through the 1990's. In the foreword he bemoans the modern obsession with celebrity and has made a point of gathering stories of ordinary people (although he apparently couldn't resist including a piece on his five-year stint as a speech writer for a melancholy Prince Charles). The essays are quaint and amusing when they're not melancholy, and are interesting for an Anglophile.My favorites were:- An interview with the last tramp (as in vagrant) in Wales- The story of the man who in retirement took up competing in marathons and triathlons- The forgotten story of the 1944 explosion of a bomb storage facility in Staffordshire; until Hiroshima, the biggest explosion in the world- The story of a report written by an Oxfordshire market town's Communist Party in 1955- The account of the author's ride on a ghost train; one of the so-called Parliamentary trains in Britain that go nowhere useful and provide no practical service but continue to operate because it is cheaper to do so than to go through the legal process to close the lines. Seriously.- The piece on the Dead Writer's Society, an alliance of wildly varying literary societies
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