Long live...

I used to have a little Victorian morality story for children about a selfish rich child called Pippin. The Book was called King Pippin and I seem to remember it had a horrible ending in which Pippin drowned or something. Hold on one minute ....

No. Weird; after all these years it's missing from the book shelf and all I have is a half-memory of a lithograph of a boy running. It seems like a weird thing to title yourself after. It is, I guess.

I do have another book on my shelf though. Something a little bit more contemporary:

Steinbeck, very uncharacteristically (although I don't know a lot about John Steinbeck)wrote a farce set in France on a hypothesis of a 2^nd French revolution and a return to a monarchy. It's set in the mid-twentieth century and is quite astute and quite funny. Alright, at points I was only reading it because he had my name I admit, but, all the same, recommended.

The other thing to set me off, was assuming an alter-ego on Choke of 'The King', which taught me far too much about Elvis (and the King o the Jews).


For me, his diet was one of the interesting things. He would wake up in the night and snack heavily. Towards the end of his life when he was clinically obese and addicted to prescription drugs (he was strictly legal, I think; when he met Nixon he was trying to get appointed drug tsar for the US) his Doctor had him on a diet of just jello, but he still had a cook on the payroll who would cook him whatever gorgeous fatty concoction he would dream up. Various myths surround his actual weight at the autopsy.