STEPHEN FRY

So here I am. In a hotel room in New York. The writing desk and its view of xth Avenue are all but obscured by:-

7 x Mini USB cables: 2 of them are the new Micro type that Blackberry has switched to for the Storm only, the rest are standard.

1 x Ethernet cable: into wall-socket of hotel room. 8 bucks a day. But using Ethernet rather than the hotel’s wi-fi allows me to share via a wireless network that I create on my laptop. That way all my other toys can be online without separate logging on and billing. Hotels make so much money from “high-speed” internet these days. Well, they’ve lost their once juicy phone income I suppose. I remember back in the early nineties, before the world wide web was so much a glint in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye and the net was all VERONICA, JANET, WAIS, Gopher and FTP, I ran up a Princeton hotel phone bill of three and half thousand dollars in one calendar week. Ach, die schöne Zeit …

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Well my goodness me what an extraordinary response there was to #oscarwildeday

For those who didn’t participate or might have been away or not yet following me, December 1st was designated #oscarwildeday. I promised prizes for those who tweeted the best original or made up Wildean remarks or posted pictures of themselves or others in Wildean poses.

Collage by @taluta © Tatula 2008

It has been an unbelievably time-consuming but pleasurable task to find winners. I’m sorry it’s taken so long, but I landed in New York on the day itself and have been busy ever since.

The three categories then are
1. Original Wildeisms,
2. Creative Manglings
3. Pictures

There are two winners in each category. The prizes, of a value exceeding rubies, are vouchers for a free download of my readings of Oscar Wilde short stories:

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Everything we know about people is wrong.

Well, perhaps that’s going a little far. But, really. Take Oscar. Oscar Wilde. He stands for one thing and one thing only. Wit. Sharp wit. Glittering wit. Keen, wicked, penetrating wit. Camp. Clever. Crushing. Proud, peacocky and impertinent.

Recording Oscar Wilde and Anton Chekhov. © Samfry Ltd 2008

Wrong. Wrong, wronger, wrongest.

Certainly Wilde was witty, certainly he is remembered for firing off epigrams like a belt-fed mortar. But look properly at the man and his works and you will see that the spirits that most animated him were in fact those of sympathy and imagination., which are really one spirit. Wilde was an artist; he was of course prince among artists in his time. He championed art above everything. But that is because he understood that art is the product, not of intellect, wit or superior faculties of understanding, but of imagination. As it happens he had intellect, wit and superior faculties of understanding and he had them in spades. Such

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Language. Language, language, language. In the end it all comes down to language. I write to you today on this subject as a way of welcoming you to www.stephenfry.com 2.0 and because, well, it’s a subject worth thinking about at any time and because fewer things interest me quite so much.


Image: Nicole Stewart for SamFry

There are so many questions and issues jostling, tumbling and colliding in my mind that I can barely list them. Is language the father of thought? There’s one. Somebody once said, “How can I tell you what I think until I’ve heard what I’m going to say?” Is language being degraded, is it not what it was? Is there a right way to express yourself and a wrong? Grammar, does that exist, or is it a pedantic imposition, a kind of unnatural mixture of strangulation and straightening, like pleaching, pollarding and training pear-trees against a wall? Can we translate from one tongue into another without

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Stephen Fry explains the suitcase of cables he takes with him when travelling

Column “Dork Talk” published on Saturday 18th October 2008 in The Guardian “Dork Talk” - The Guardian headline.

It’s farewell for quite a few months, I fear, as I head off to Africa, Mauritius, Indonesia, New Zealand and the Sea of Cortez to make a documentary about disappearing species. I shall be out of reach of broadband, mobile phone and even landlines for much of the time. That will not stop me from taking a suitcase full of cables, chargers, memory cards and connectors, however, and I thought I might, by way of valediction, give you an inventory of what this particular dork packs when he travels.

Photograph: Alamy

First of all, should all else fail, I will make sure that there’s at least one of Trevor Baylis’s products in my bag. Baylis, you may remember, pioneered the wind-up radio. On the eco-gadget site biggreensmile.com you can find his company’s

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