So my friend the reader said she was on a cruise with a bunch of jocks..I gather her husband was one of them. But she found a reader and they were going to have tea one day and another woman asked if she could join them. The talk was about books. The third woman said, "I read a book once.” Really.

So my friend politely asked the name of the book.

“I can’t remember,” said the third woman, but it was on my high school course.”

“To Kill a Mocking Bird,” said my friend.

“That was it! I liked it.”

My father had almost the same experience but wasn’t given a sufficient clue. When a patient of his said he had read a book once, my father asked for the name of the book.

“I don’t remember,” said his patient, “ but it was a blue book.”

That became one of our family’s favourite non-seqiturs—along with “then every day come a letter’ “, “salad sucks”, “have you ever heard of a case like that before?”—and so on. You must have your own.

In my peak days I used to have readings at bookstores (usually a disaster) and signed books. Someone came up to me once and asked me why I was defacing the books.

Sigh.