Reader Millington* on...
Born in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to both parents, Jonathan was a small baby. Fortunately, doctors told his mother that babies are small and everything was quite normal and she should stop screaming now. For two years he did pretty much nothing whatsoever. Perhaps he was preparing himself for the work ahead, perhaps not. One day Science may gives us the answer to such questions, but for now - tantalisingly - Jonathan's first twenty-four months remain a mystery.
What we do know is that at the time of Jonathan's first word* the family moved to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), following the path of the buffalo. Apart from financial hardship, constant threat of civil unrest and the loss of several close friends in a series of house fires, Jonathan had a happy childhood and, upon entering school, settled in well.
Doug Grave - Jonathan's constant companion from the first day of infant school until nearly a week later, when he found more interesting people and cut him dead - remembers.
"Ahh, Jonathan." He laughs. "I remember Jonathan as a small boy of about five. When our teacher, Mrs de Mark, would read out his name for the register he would call back 'Here' or 'Present.' That was the type of boy Jonathan was."
This skill with words was spotted by a local reporter, Dave Dave.
"I came because a well-known psychiatric patient had run amok in the school with a sabre, killing six pupils and staff and injuring dozens more. But I got talking to Jonathan and ended up just writing a story about his tree-house instead." Dave clicks his teeth. "Ruined me, of course. I haven't been able to get work since."
Then, suddenly, over the course of the next six years, Fate took a hand. His mother having won a private education at the bingo, Jonathan was sent to Burma (now Myanmar) for schooling. Robin Gett, who later went on to study sodomy at Cambridge, was a Fourth Former at the time.
"I recall he said that he'd had some 'difficulty' getting to the school.* I thought nothing of it at the time. Then, perhaps three months later, I overheard him saying he had to critique four 'verses' of Keats by the following morning. I didn't think anything of that either. Now, of course, I realise it was the first, embryonic, appearance of the Difficulty vs Unfairness article that would crown his career."
Another schoolfriend, Tony N Hip, also notes "Yes, Difficulty vs Unfairness, it was meant for Jonathan to write it. Even then he'd abbreviate Latin words. Etc, ad lib, he'd do it all the time - we used to call it 'Doing a Jonathan.' Yes."
Before long - relatively speaking - Jonathan became consumed with the dream of the Difficulty vs Unfairness piece and took an apartment in Holland (now The Netherlands) to work on it in seclusion. Unfortunately, the apartment he took was the wartime home of Anne Frank.
"Squatting has a long tradition in The Netherlands," Mink de Ville, then Minister of History and Culture, is on record as saying, "but this was just going too far. We had to force him out with fire hoses."
Clutching the wet manuscript, Jonathan fled to Rutland (now part of Leicestershire). Seeing no one but the people he met during the normal course of things, he spent up to eight hours a day refining the text.* And what a text it became. Passion and precision married in exactly 1500 words of easy erudition. The piece that Melvyn Bragg remarked made him "feel like (he'd) just had fantastic sex then slipped into a soapy bath." The piece that has joined the Bible and the works of Shakespeare as a 'given' on Desert Island Discs. The piece about which the head of the Muslim Council of Great Britain wrote "compared to this, the Koran is bollocks".
The very same piece that, any day now, we'll all be able to enjoy at AP2.