You're beautiful

She told me that she'd grown used to the noise of her neighbours through the wall. One played Michael Jackson all the time. The other cabaret, and when he played James Brown's You're Beautiful over and over - end to end, as she said, all day and all night - she assumed he was feeling low.

Only three removes

Today I am only three removes from Kafka, having talked to someone who has talked to a concert pianist - a Holocaust survivor - who used to know him (and didn't think him nice).

Listen

Abcde

She told us that, in her work as a doctor, she’d seen many young patients whose first names were Abcde. One patient might have been accidental, perhaps, or the first random find on an internet search; perhaps it was a joke, we thought, like the names Zoe Bowie and Telephone Booth, or a situation where migrants who didn’t speak English wrote the only five letters they had ever been taught. But the fact remains that there is more than one child called Abcde – and all of them white, she said, with Australian born parents. It had to be the fashion, we decided: la mode. Le chic.

The pronunciation, of course, is not straightforward.