The last sentence of the novel I have just finished (SPOILER ALERT):

“Everything had gone wrong, and he had succeeded at nothing, and he was never going to have any kind of life at all.”

Hey, thanks, literary fiction! Again! I wish the author had found a way to move that line somewhere up towards the beginning, thus saving me a lot of trouble.

Now that ‘An Education’ is out on general release, we have a never-ending queue of people happy to tell us where we have made mistakes with early-60s period detail. My mother-in-law is very anxious about a Pyrex dish in an early scene. (The word ‘Pyrex’ was invented by the glassware company in 1915.) Somebody else was troubled by the appearance of a tea-bag. (If you care, the tea-bag celebrated its one hundredth birthday this year.) A film critic who gave us a five-star review told the producers that the construction “I was so hoping…” was a verbal anachronism, and that ‘so’ plus gerund was imported from Australia in the 1970s . . .

It’s not just the period you have to get right, clearly. If you have set a film or a book at a time within the last seventy-odd years, then it’s people’s memories of the period you have to respect, too. If they don’t remember tea-bags, then you’ve had it.

TALES FROM THE ROAD 1:

I am on a train from the south coast back to London. Across the aisle, three elderly passengers, two women and a man, buy coffee from the trolley.
“What you do,” says the elderly man to his friends, “Is, you sip through the hole in the top of the lid.”
The two elderly women give it a go, tentatively at first, and pronounce themselves amazed and delighted at this technological breakthrough.
“I only found that out myself when I went to Hastings,” said the man.
What happened in Hastings? I wish I knew.

TALES FROM THE ROAD 2:

I am in a hotel in New York. Outraged by the mini-bar prices, I go out to buy a bottle of whiskey, and contrive to smash it to smithereens in the lobby, right by the reception desk. I end up raiding the mini-bar anyway.
Just as I’m pouring my drink, the phone rings.
“Mr Hornby? This is the concierge. You can take that bottle back to the shop and get a refund. The seal isn’t broken. You have the receipt?”
I tell him that, seeing as the bottle is in a thousand pieces, I wouldn’t feel good waving the neck and asking for my money back. I point out that the breakage was pretty much my own stupid fault.
“Up to you.”
Two minutes later, the phone rings again.
“It’s the concierge again. I’m sorry to trouble you. But do you have that receipt?”
“Why? I’m not going back to the shop.”
“If you’re not going to use it, could I have it?”
Only in New York, et cetera.

The first episode of ‘The Richest Man In Britain’ is on Radio 4 this Friday at 11.30. I am not entirely clear whether that’s in the morning or in the evening, but I don’t suppose it matters much, what with iPlayers and iTunes and so on. You could go to the cinema to see ‘An Education’, come home, and turn on the radio. Or the computer.