Every Sunday afternoon, before inflicting the Nonsense on the rest of you, I WhatsApp the final draft to a friend to make sure she thinks it’s okay to send. I generally trust her judgement, and she’s known me long enough to tolerate my obsession with insurance and the photograph of The Room on my living room wall.
Last Sunday I was running late and didn’t send it until about 8pm, having forgotten that on Sunday evenings she drives home from work, as there are no trains.
This meant that, rather than reading it at her leisure, her Apple CarPlay recited the entire Nonsense to her, word for word, in a monotone computer voice.
For twenty minutes.
As she put it, “One minute I was listening to a podcast about the Taliban, then I was subjected to another form of extremism.“
Perhaps not entirely unfair, but my first reaction was to wonder whether CarPlay might represent an exciting new distribution channel.
It turns out, though, that having your nonsense read aloud to an audience who question your sanity has a rather extraordinary precedent. And it happened, of course because this is me, at Lloyd’s.
On 23 April 1711, Joseph Addison, essayist and co-founder of The Spectator, published an account of something rather unfortunate that had happened to him at Edward Lloyd’s Coffee House.
Addison carried scraps of paper around with him, covered in notes for future articles. These were ideas really for his blog, if blogs had existed in 1711. I can get on board with that.
One day, he left one of these sheets behind at Lloyd’s.
Some customers found it and thought it was hilarious. Nobody knew whose it was, so the coffee house boy was sent up into the pulpit, where the auctions and shipping news were normally read out, to read the whole thing to the room in case somebody claimed it.
Addison was still there.
He sat and listened as his own unfinished writing was read to a room full of strangers, who found it enormously entertaining. Some concluded it had been written by a madman. Others thought it was somebody taking notes from The Spectator, which, given Addison wrote for it, was accidentally rather perceptive.
The notes included a dromedary, a barber’s pole, a gridiron and a proposition that no man under six feet tall should be permitted to play a tragic hero.
I think the man showed promise. He certainly liked nonsense…
One particularly suspicious gentleman decided that these apparently innocent references were some sort of secret code, and suggested the paper ought to be handed to a Secretary of State.
So, in a single reading, The Room had gone from laughing at a piece of nonsense to treating it as a threat to national security.
Addison, meanwhile, was far too embarrassed to admit the notes were his. When the boy handed him the paper, he examined it gravely, shook his head in apparent disapproval, twisted it up and used it to light his pipe.
Which strikes me as an unnecessarily drastic way of avoiding editorial feedback, although I admit I wish I could do the same.
Before anyone accuses me of inventing this, it’s all there in issue 46 of The Spectator. I am not making this up.
Addison may have been, of course. He was a satirist. But that is an entirely different allegation, and not one I’m qualified to answer on behalf of a man who has been dead for three centuries.
But I haven’t told you my little secret.
Addison’s own name for his pages of unfinished notes, which made very little sense to anybody but himself, was a “Rhapsody of Nonsense“.
A rhapsody of nonsense.
At Lloyd’s.
Read aloud from a pulpit to a room full of people who thought the author had lost his mind.
I imagine the significance of this has already occurred to the more observant amongst you.
Yes, after six months, I can finally reveal that The Sunday Nonsense is, of course, named in homage to Joseph Addison. I’ve been patiently waiting for somebody to spot the 315-year-old literary reference, but apparently my faith in the historical literacy of my readership was misplaced.
Nobody noticed.
Any suggestion that I only discovered this extraordinary coincidence earlier this week is an outrageous allegation, and I shall not be dignifying it with a response.
So that’s Lloyd’s in 1711: coffee, gossip, and a man setting fire to his own homework.
But Addison’s notes were the exception. Most of what was read out at Lloyd’s was news, and ninety-two years later, with Britain once again at war, the news was rather less entertaining. Ships taken. Battles fought. Lists of the dead.
This time, nobody laughed.
On 20 July 1803, the merchants and underwriters of Lloyd’s established what became known as Lloyd’s Patriotic Fund, to help wounded servicemen and the widows and children of those who had been killed.
In just nine days it raised £74,200, including £20,000 from Lloyd’s itself. By 1815 it had supported more than 11,000 wounded servicemen, over 2,300 widows and nearly 3,500 children and other dependants.
Extraordinary sums at the time, although the numbers that matter to me are the people.
A sailor who came home from battle unable to work. A wife whose husband hadn’t come home at all. Children who had lost their father and, with him, the person who was supposed to provide for them.
There wasn’t an insurance policy requiring the market to help these people. Nobody had paid a premium for the promise. There wasn’t a slip to scratch, a deductible to argue over or an exclusion to consult.
The market simply decided that these people needed help, and that it was in a position to provide it.
So it did.
And it never stopped. The fund carried on through the centuries and survives today as Lloyd’s Veterans Charity. More than two hundred and twenty years later, people are still being helped because of a decision taken by a market that once laughed at a dromedary. I love that.
We spend most of our time talking about promises we’re legally obliged to keep. Quite right too. That’s the job.
But there’s something particularly lovely about a promise nobody was obliged to make in the first place.
It says something about the character of a market that grew out of a coffee house, and the people who have sustained it ever since.
In 1711, the room heard a page of nonsense and laughed.
In 1803, it heard about widows and orphans and reached into its pockets.
You can tell a great deal about a room by what it does with what it hears.
Which brings me back to Joseph Addison.
Three hundred and fifteen years ago, a man sat in Lloyd’s listening to his own nonsense being read aloud while the audience questioned his sanity and somebody considered reporting him to the authorities.
Last Sunday, my friend reached much the same conclusion about me.
The technology has improved enormously.
The critical reception, apparently, has not.
Have a good week,
Rob
P.S. I shall endeavour to send future editions to my friend before she gets into her car. I have made no undertaking whatsoever to write shorter ones.
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