Satire Day

 Believe it or not, there is a World Satire Day (or rather World Day of Satire), inaugurated in Nigeria in 2019 and, I think it's fair to say, not very widely observed. Its date, November 9th, seems to have been chosen for no particular reason. Today, October 28th, would be a much better candidate, as it is both the anniversary of the publication of Gulliver's Travels and the birthday of Evelyn Waugh (born 1903), who in my opinion was at his very best in his early satires – Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Black Mischief, A Handful of Dust and (my own favourite) Scoop.
   Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts, by Lemuel Gulliver was published on this day 200 years ago. I remember the thrill of reading it in full for the first time, and realising that this was something very different from the sanitised tale I'd known in my childhood, and that Lilliput and Brobdingnag were the least of it. Johnson famously said of the Travels that 'When once you have thought of little men and big men, it is very easy to do the rest' – one of his more flippant judgments, and one that is surely wrong: 'the rest' is actually the hard part. The voyages to the flying island of philosophers, Laputa, to the magician's dwelling on Glubbdubdrib, to the unhappily immortal Struldbrugs of Luggnagg, and finally to the land of the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos – these surely were the hard parts to write, the boldest in imagination and the fiercest in their satire. They are also a great deal harder to read, more difficult and disturbing, than the relatively knockabout adventures in Lilliput and Brobdingnag. They are, of course, a million miles from the dreary consensual pap that passes for 'satire' on radio and television these days.