Travelling back from a night out with my brother and cousin in the surreal city within a city that is Canary Wharf, I ended up sitting next to a woman who was reading a paperback book.
She wasn't just reading it. She was devouring it, feverishly flipping pages and then writing things in the margins with a biro or highlighting sentences or whole paragraphs with a yellow highlighter pen.
There seemed to be something of the "look at me, aren't I interesting and fascinating and doesn't this behaviour make you think I'm a clever and intense person?" about her.
Possibly she just was intense. And I only thought that about her because on occasion I have tried the same kind of trick to look enigmatic and interesting.
It has never worked.
I can see why now. You look like a manic idiot who must be avoided at all costs!
Anyway, she seemed to be highlighting almost every other sentence and making many notes (the only one I read being "THE WORD", though I couldn't make sense of why she'd chosen to write that by a particularly dull paragraph), so I became curious as to what this amazing and presumably enlightening piece of literature might be. I hoped to glean some of its knowledge and possibly make myself a better person into the process. At the very least I hoped it might persuade me to buy a yellow highlighter pen to use flamboynatly on public transport.
The book was by a lady called Mary Kay. I guess it was her picture on the front. She was back-lit, with heavily hair-dressed grey hair and a smug smile which made me assume she was American (call me a presumptuous racist if you will, but I think I am right).
The book was called, "Plan Your Life The Way You Plan Your Vacation."
Ah, OK. It was that kind of book. Self help, change your life, become a better person. But as titles go it's not really up there with say, I don't know "Relax Your Shoulders", is it?
I wondered how she'd managed to stretch this idea out into a whole (though admittedly not particularly thick) book. The way I plan my holidays is to dash at the last minute to the Travel Agent and say, "Have you got any good bargains going for tomorrow or the day after?"
And thinking about it, that might be quite a good way to plan my life. Though I think the travel agent would become annoyed with my constant non-travel related queries. "Do you think I should go out with Jackie or Joanna?"
"I don't really know sir"
"Well which ones cheaper? I'm really looking for an adventure kind of girlfriend. I don't want to be going round museums and stuff."
"Really, sir. Unless you want a holiday you are going to have to leave."
Or maybe Mary Kay is talking about the plans you make before you go on holiday. Which in my case involves dashing around the house in the five minutes before the taxi arrives to take me to the airport, throwing things into a suitcase and wondering where my passport is.
And I already live the rest of my life like that. I don't need a book to tell me.
Anyway, I tried to strain to read the book, but for someone being so brazenly demonstrative about her reading, she seemed reluctant to share her book with anyone else and kept shielding it from me.
I managed to only really read one of the sentences that the lady highlighted. It read, "You can eat an elephant one bite at a time."
If that is indicative of the stuff that the woman was highlighting then I think she might really have just been drawing on the book at random.
Presumably Mary Kay is attempting to say we can accomplish a big task by slowly carrying out the smaller tasks that make up the bigger one. I've made a similar point in the past on here. It's worth pointing out, but is hardly world shatteringly important. I'm not convinced it's worth wasting some highlighting pen on.
The point is OK, but the metaphor isn't a very good one.(Presuming it is a metaphor. I may be taking it out of context. I only read that sentence. For all I know the chapter may acutally have literally been about eating elephants. In which case Mary Kay's advise is sound. When eating an elephant, for God's sake never attempt to put the whole thing in your mouth at once- like the old woman who swallowed the menagerie- eat it a bite at a time, and probably take regular three or four hour breaks when you are full to allow the elephant parts you have consumed to digest)
Firstly, you can't eat an elephant one bite at a time. You can eat much of an elephant in that way, at least I presume so, I've never known of anyone eating one. I don't know how good they taste, but cavemen hunted mammoth, so I'm guessing much of an elephant is edible. However there are definitely parts of an elephant that you can't eat. I don't think the skin would be particularly edible. The giant elephant bones would be hard to digest even if crushed to powder and made into an elephant bone soup and the tusks would definitely be inedible. Certainly through biting. Anyone attempting to bite a tusk in order to eat it woulc soon learn the superiority of ivory over enamel.
Secondly an elephant is an endangered species and I think it would be morally wrong to attempt to eat any part of it. If you have no qulams about morality you'd still have difficulty. At best you could probably nip in, shoot one and take a bite out of one of its legs, before the wardens saw what you were up to and you'd have to make good your escape. Picking the elephant hide out of your teeth and with elephant blood dribbling down your chin. Your mad red eyes caught in the light of the firebrands of the pursuing furious mob.
For these and many other reasons it is a rubbish metaphor and definitely not worth underlining. But all of our curiousities are now pricked. I think Amazon may see an influx of interest in this book about eating elephants and planning vacations (presumably a vacation in India would satisfy both criteria). Let's see if we can make it number one in the sales ranking.
