[Chris O'Carroll]

No 4228
Set by Leonora Casement
We asked for examples of literary discrepancies uncovered: for example, Lewis Carroll’s “golden afternoon” jaunt with Alice Liddell on 4 July 1862, which was, according to the Met Office, “cool” and “rather wet”.

This week’s winners
We had one email asking whether the discrepancies should be real or invented. We replied that they could certainly be real but, if made up, they should be extremely hard, nay, impossible to check – our fear being that, knowing how compers’ minds work, we could be setting ourselves up for being on the receiving end of an avalanche of complaints at our idiocy in letting checkable and inaccurate examples win. You, pedants? Perish the thought! However, the difficulty of choosing real ones was to make sure that, if a genuine mistake, they should not have been noticed or written about extensively before, which would obviously fail the comp’s high standards of novelty and creativity. One comper (among many) who fell at this fence sent in an entry about how the poet John Keats had confused Cortés with Balboa in “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”. Try googling this if you don’t believe us. But we didn’t reject such well-known evolutionary howlers as the “marriage” of an owl and a pussycat as falling outside this comp’s remit (although this entry didn’t win). The winners get £25 each, with the Tesco vouchers going, in addition, to Alban Girral. Finally, an hon mensh to Derek Morgan for asking how, as apple blossom appears in May, it’s still around at Mr Knightley’s lunch party, which takes place in the middle of June . . .

Standard deviation
We at the British Standards Institution are currently expanding our sphere of activities to include works of literature that fail to meet our exacting criteria. We are beginning with Anna Karenina, often described as the greatest novel ever written but which is so full of technical errors that any such claim must be rejected. Here are two flagrant examples, which we have already noticed:
1.Tolstoy’s recipe for strawberry jam omits any mention of pectin, usually added in the form of lemon juice and rind. Without this, the jam, though it may not go mouldy, will never set.
2.On the day that Karenina allegedly committed suicide, pre-revolutionary records show that no trains were actually running in the Moscow region. (Full report available from HMSO, 864 pages, priced £75)
Alban Girral

Unnatural habitat
Scholars have long noted that Edward Lear’s limericks are riddled with errors of scientific fact. For example, given the disparate nesting habits of owls, hens, larks and wrens, ornithologists do not consider it remotely credible that all four species would have nested in a single beard. Many owls occupy nests and burrows created by other creatures and hens frequently forgo nest-building altogether. Larks are ground nesters, whereas wrens build in higher cavities. Furthermore, no person of Prague, or any other locality, has ever been cured of plague by the therapeutic administration of butter, a substance that possesses no effectiveness against the Yersinia pestis bacterium. And reputable physicians are unanimous in the opinion that no human being has sufficient stomach capacity to ingest 18 entire rabbits.
Chris O’Carroll

Just too late for me
In “Annus Mirabilis”, Philip Larkin states that sexual intercourse “began” in 1963, between “the end of the Chatterley ban” and “the Beatles’ first LP”. However, the period as defined is between 2 November 1960 and 22 March 1963, or 869 days, only 80 of which occurred in the specified year, constituting about 9 per cent of the available days on which intercourse could have started. During the narrow window he gives in 1963, all days but those in the last fortnight saw intensely cold weather (the first day free from frost was 5 March). Larkin may be confusing the need for closer proximity at night for the onset of sexual activity. And it may be relevant that Hull City lost its FA Cup replay with Leyton Orient as early as 19 February.
Bill Greenwell

Naked truth
I read with interest Daniel Defoe’s intriguing tale about a castaway’s survival on a deserted island. It was on the whole a splendid adventure but I was puzzled by an apparent inconsistency in chapter six. The hero sees the abandoned ship about a mile offshore and decides to reconnoitre for provisions: “So I pulled off my clothes – for the weather was hot to extremity – and took to the water.” Reaching the vessel, he climbs on board and, “being well disposed to eat, I went to the bread room and filled my pockets with biscuit”. His pockets? Does this man possess unusual attributes? Or is this a discrepancy? We want the naked truth.
Sylvia Fairley