Plain English: September 2011 Archives

Ace Clicker

I've known the Indian photographer Pablo Bartholomew since the 1980s, when he accompanied me and a troupe of (mostly) French Michelin-starred chefs on our post-publication (of The Official Foodie Handbook) tour of India. Our lot included Pierre Troisgros, Michel Rostang, Alain Dutournier, Jean-André Charial, Jean Lameloise and journalists Gilles Pudlowski, Fay Maschler, Gael Greene and Craig Claiborne. But when this crew got to Goa, the local English-language newspaper heralded our arrival with the headline: "Ace Clicker in Town."

That, of course, was Pablo, then the best-known photographer in the subcontinent.

Pablo Bartholomew 

This question became urgent this week when my autumn roundup of performing arts events went to press on Thursday evening for Friday's paper. The "fact-checker" (I put it in scare quotes as the title is itself redundant: if something really is a fact, it obviously doesn't need checking) altered many of the dates in my piece. Why did she do this? Because she had checked the theatre websites online, and found that many if not most of them claimed that the play began before the date I had given in my copy.