Palin, Michael: Full Circle (audio)

In Full Circle, Michael Palin goes around the Pacific counter-clockwise for a BBC documentary and book. NetFlix doesn’t have the documentary, so I just listened to Palin read the book (as with his others, you can read the full text online).

I enjoyed this, but it doesn’t really lend itself to booklogging [*]. About my only comment is that I’m glad that the odds are vanishingly small that I will ever be famous, because that means I won’t have to learn how to deal with things like this:

I’m on my way to meet Mayumi Nobetsu, a girl from Tokyo whom I’ve exchanged letters with for more than twenty years without ever meeting. She first wrote to me in 1974 when, to everyone’s surprise, Monty Python briefly reared its head on Japanese television. The handwriting and spelling of her first letter were immaculate, the grammar ambitious. ‘I am fourteen years old Japanese girl,’ it had begun. She kept writing to me, sending protestations of love and valuable information on the erratic affair between Monty Python and the Japanese public. Now in her thirties, she is managing a hotel.

 . . . I have had a lurking worry that she may have got the wrong Python, but she opens the locket around her neck and there is a picture of me as a thirty-one-year-old Sir Galahad in The Holy Grail.

[*] Or maybe it’s just that I was really exhausted all the time I was listening to it. I keep finding text in the online book that I’d swear I’d never heard, even though I’m sure it was there: I must have just briefly zoned out for that paragraph.