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Issue 6 of Five Dials, Hamish Hamilton’s brilliant literary magazine, landed in inboxes on Friday with this time-and-space refuting missive:

You may have noticed we call ourselves a monthly, but if you’re waiting for Five Dials to appear every 30 days, well, sorry, we are a little late. But what is a month? Our definition doesn’t quite sync with that of the Gregorian calendar. We hope you are the kind of reader who would rather enjoy tardy brilliance than a magazine that shows up with dreary regularity. Who knows? You might see another another edition in around 30 days, whatever ‘30 days’ means.

The very next day, Geoff Dyer walked into the pages of the Guardian Review, removed all his clothes and beat himself with a very thorny branch. His crime? Late, by forty-five whole minutes:

This incident was so out of character, so totally inexplicable, that I spent much of a sleepless night trying to find someone or something to blame: Andrew Kelly, the trains (punctual to the minute), my parents (who had instilled in me the necessity for being reliable and punctual), my wife … But no. It was no one’s fault but mine.

… I don’t know what to think. I only know how I feel: like a broken man, like someone who no longer has a moral leg to stand on. It is horrible, and I am so sorry.

“Fuck you”, or “fuck me”? What do you prefer?

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