Just two of the unbelievable but true stories from 2019’s weirdest book of the year

The Book Of The Year 2019: The World’s Weirdest News 

No Such Thing As A Fish 

Hutchinson £12.99

Rating:

Did you know that in 2019 a Belgian man broke the record for sitting on the toilet for the longest time – 116 hours? Or that a zoo in Texas has offered members of the public the chance to have cockroaches named after their ex-partners? Or that a woman who ordered a size 16 bikini was sent two size eight bikinis instead?

There’s been a long tradition of newspaper columns with titles along the lines of ‘It’s a Funny Old World’ or ‘Just Fancy That’, providing a home for off-beat, comical stories to offset all the surrounding news of mayhem and misery.

The popular podcasters collectively known as ‘No Such Thing as a Fish’ have now constructed an entire book out of the wackiest news stories of the past year. This has been tried before, without much success, but the Fish team set about their task with such verve that they succeed where others failed. Their Book Of The Year series is now in its third year, and is well on its way to becoming an institution.

The book is arranged alphabetically by subject, but the subjects are appropriately random – Q is for Quantum Entanglement, Quarks, The Queen, Quiet, Quitters and Quizzes – so you can really dip in anywhere and be sure of finding something unexpected and amusing. For instance, under The Queen, we learn that following the success of the biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, the band Queen are now wealthier than the actual Queen, that a prankster ordered £46 of pizza for ‘Elizabeth’ at Buckingham Palace, that a German company sent 1,000 toilet rolls to the Palace to offset possible post-Brexit shortages, and that President Trump claimed he and the Queen took such a shine to one another that ‘There are those that say they have never seen the Queen have a better time’.

Needless to say, Trump pops up in these pages like a jack-in-the-box. It is particularly good to be reminded of the speech he made at an Independence Day parade about how in 1775, ‘Our Army manned the air. It rammed the ramparts. It took over the airports’, forgetting that the first airport in America was not built until 1909. Confronted with his mistake, he blamed it on the bad weather, which had caused his teleprompter to break down. But he then wrecked his excuse by boasting: ‘I knew that speech very well, so I was able to do it without a teleprompter.’ Has any President in history ever been the source of so much laughter?

The compilers delight in the folly of mankind. The very first story, listed under ‘AA’, concerns two Chinese tourists who hoped to visit a Norwegian village called A, put ‘Aa’ into their satnav by mistake and ended up in another village 815 miles away. Towards the end of the book, a similar story concerns a retired hairdresser from Newcastle, Luigi Rimonti, who wanted to make a pilgrimage to Rome. Alas, helping hands put ‘Rom’ into his satnav, and he ended up 1,000 miles north of Rome, in the village of Rom in Germany.

Aspiration is the mother of folly; a number of stories centre around the competitive urge. I very much enjoyed the story of the Drake Curse: throughout 2019 the Canadian rapper Drake kept posing for a series of photographs with sportsmen – including the boxer Anthony Joshua and the footballer Layvin Kurzawa – who subsequently lost miserably. Eventually the Italian football team A S Roma banned their players from being photographed with Drake, and the Toronto Maple Leafs begged him to stop attending their matches. We all want to be winners, no matter what we win. Under L for Lawnmowers, comes the news that a man called David Rush from Idaho broke the record for balancing a running lawnmower on his chin, lasting three minutes and 52 seconds. He trained for three years to accomplish this bizarre feat. Mr Rush is, it emerges, a seasoned record-breaker, with 100 records to his name, including putting 146 blueberries in his mouth, having 100 lit candles in his mouth at the same time, and identifying the most flavours of ice cream in one minute while blindfolded (12). Incidentally, the fastest lawnmower in the world – the Mean Mower V2 – can reach a speed of 150mph.

In my childhood, The Guinness Book Of Records was full of people eating all sorts of disgusting things, or doing weird things with their bodies. I remember being amazed that a man had eaten an entire double decker bus over a period of something like 12 years. But these days, it has gone all safety-conscious, and restricts itself to the more anodyne records. Three cheers, then, for The Book Of The Year for including all sorts of unsavoury material. It might almost be subtitled Don’t Try This At Home.

I loved a category on Smuggling, for example. In 2019, a woman who was walking rather awkwardly through a Taiwan airport was found to have 24 gerbils strapped to her legs, and a Canadian man tried to smuggle 5,000 leeches in his hand luggage on a flight back home from Russia. The authors add: ‘Perhaps the least competent smuggler to be apprehended was a Colombian man who was arrested in Barcelona airport while attempting – extremely conspicuously – to smuggle half a kilo of cocaine under his wig. CNN called him a “cocaine bigwig”, and the New York Post said the criminal would have “hell toupée”.’

Though the overall tone is jocular, sometimes verging on facetious, the authors still allow space for weighty topics from the past year, such as the troubles in Hong Kong, climate change and the fire at Notre-Dame. Of course, they look at these events from an oblique angle, but why not? It’s interesting to know that after two million Hong Kong residents marched in a single day against the extradition laws, the government-owned newspaper China Daily led with the headline, ‘HK parents march against US meddling’ – reporting on a protest by 30 dignitaries outside the US consulate.

And under M for Melting, we learn that Arctic ice is melting so fast that it keeps swallowing the equipment that measures how fast it’s melting. Most glimpses of the future are sufficient to send a shiver down the spine. Under B for Big Brother comes the news that 50 billboards in the UK have been fitted with facial detection software that can identify the age, gender and mood of a passer-by, and then show an advertisement designed to appeal to that particular person. And in a Chinese high school, pupils wear bracelets that record how often they put up their hands in class.

But the future may not be all gloom and doom: on a happier note, it seems that someone has invented a new kind of alcohol that doesn’t give you a hangover.

Inevitably, the authors touch on quite a few stories that have the ring of familiarity: Jimmy Page’s row with Robbie Williams, for instance, or the failed attempt to blackmail Jeff Bezos after he sent a saucy selfie. Equally, events since November – the General Election, Prince Andrew’s duff Newsnight interview – are too recent for inclusion, so that the book’s title is not fully justified. But with familiar stories, the authors always manage to dig up something I didn’t know, or had forgotten: for instance, the man Bezos accused of the blackmail was aptly named David Pecker, and one of Jimmy Page’s complaints against his neighbour Robbie Williams was that he had taunted him by dressing up in a long wig and a fake beer-belly in order to look like Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant.

And this is what I particularly like about The Book Of The Year: the authors always remain curious and excited: for all their comic strengths, they are never too cynical to be fascinated. Despite everything, they still regard the world as a place of wonder.