Roti and reading

Before Easter, I was alone at home [agane: nobody luvs meeee] tasked to make a hella gurt stack of Knockroti, in anticipation of the appearance of Dau.I and Dau.II from Dublin. You know how teenage boys can make short work of an 800g sliced pan & 250g of butter at RT°C, so long as a toaster is available? My family will give them a run for their money - and no toaster need apply: ignoring that universal advice of never eat anything longer than a child's leg or bigger than your own head. It's busy work but not mentally taxing, so it's a good time to ear-book a podcast or something from Borrowbox. My cupboard was bare on both these fronts so I downloaded more-or-less the first non-fiction book that was a) available now b) not a diet book written by an influencer.

As you see above, the Roti shift was productive. The rando borro boxxo was [surprisingly?] on message:

 . . . Failosophy: A Handbook For When Things Go Wrong by Elizabeth Day. I'd never 'eard of 'er - or her book. But it turns out that Day [b. 1978] is a British journalist and book-writer who was raised in Derry (where her Dad was a surgeon in Altnagelvin Hospital) and, in the 00s wrote for a rash of different papers in London. Then in 2018, she launched a podcast How to Fail with Elizabeth Day which turned out to be phenomenally successful. Failosophy is her publisher's second bite at that gravy train.

The conceit of the podcast is that Celeb is contacted in advance and invited to jot down three life-changing failures. If these notes meet some sort of threshold, research is done and Celeb invited in to be grilled about the life lessons.There is no requirement to sort between fale and pech fails. These two Dutch words apparently mean "I booted my driving test by mounting the pavement while reversing round a corner" = fale and "My father was killed when a block of frozen urine crashed through his Heathrow-adjacent greenhouse" = pech. You can imagine yourself learning from the former; from the latter, nt so much.

Lemn Sissay, Brenda Hale, Nigel Slater and Malcolm Gladwell are among those who have featured both on this podcast and The Blob. There is an arresting clip from the interview with Mo Gawdat, whose 21 y.o. son died under the knife during a routine bit of surgery. Asked if he was devastated by the loss, Gawdat answered [paraphrase!] "Sure, of course we're gutted, but I spend more time reflecting on the wonderful two decades during which Ali was the light of our lives". What matters is not the crappy hands which life deals you; it's how you play the cards you get.