Lost In Translation

Nothing to do translation, I’m afraid, but pecuniary self-interest nudges me towards mentioning ‘8 out 10 Brits: Intriguing and Useless Statistics about the World’s 79th Largest Nation’. It’s Britain by numbers, the numbers including 2000 (how many of our listed buildings are red phone boxes), 676 (how many miles the average dog walker covers per year, the equivalent figure for gym members being 468) and 45 (the percentage of tea drinkers who take sugar in it). Also mentioned are the fact that the country’s most dangerous sport is fishing, that Heathrow Airport is 6 times the size of Monaco, and that while the average time spent looking at an item of clothing before buying it is 22 minutes, the time spent looking at a house before buying it is 18 minutes.

Available in all good bookshops, and quite a few ropey ones. Or you could let your mouse do the walking here.

Thanks to all those who received one or both of the books for Christmas and have been sending in suggestions. I particularly liked this from Sian Beautyman - it’s an advert for a Spanish campsite’s dance evening:

Come for all sorts of dancing with the strangers.

If there’s one category that stands out as the most fertile ground for LiTs, it has to be the hotel fire notice. Robert Treharne Jones has spotted this gem in Beijing:

Please don’t worry if a fire is occurring. We hotel have owned succor scattering facilities to sure you transmitted safely.

Mrs Croker has a refreshingly silly sense of humour, so I knew she’d laugh at this, sent in by Alan Baker of Australia:

On blackboard outside cafe, Istanbul: Chicken tits – hot as hell

I wasn’t wrong.

… you just can’t see what they were getting at. An advert for an apartment to rent in Barcelona proclaims: I have an educated affluent small dog.

Do email me if you can work out what they meant …

Sterling research work from Ulrike Parker in Germany, who spotted this on the packaging for a Chinese duster:

Grease removing - Softness - Bibulousness

No plasm - No shrinking - high strength

Sewing at warp-winse and crosswise by combining high-density natural fibre surface with the best soft interior lay, it features solid and deformation with the best using effect.

Merci beaucoup to Louise Brown, who spotted this hotel gem in the French capital:

We thank you for agreeing to put by ground the bathroom linen which you wish to make wash.

My weekend visit to Barcelona was disappointingly free of LiTs - until the last minute, when the stunning church of La Sagrada Familia stepped nobly up with their petition about a proposed rail route:

… they will ask the competent organisms to study another alternative route.

A great article from Ben Macintyre in The Times the other day, pointing out that he’d had similar experiences to mine at the Great Wall of China. I particularly liked Please walk carefully on abrupt slope and dangerous way.

You can read the piece here.

Happy New Year, and many thanks for the e-mails from everyone who received the books as Christmas presents. Particular thanks to John Beadle - until now my favourite Indian LiT had been the jar of jam labelled ‘contains no fruit whatsoever’, but it’s been surpassed by this extract from the country’s Highway Code:

We should not drive in the drinking mood and with the worries of the mind. At the time of driving, we should not accompany by ladies. If we do it so, it will create accident.