Dear LPG, 

Now that I have found your web site. I cannot help but look at what subject the writer of the day is going to home in on.   Some of them get me started on an online quest to learn more, even though I often feel that I will have no interest in them after reading the first paragraph.  

For instance, I have little interest in trying any of CB’s independence recipes, but I enjoy reading what went wrong when she tried them.

As a man of the world, you will understand that cooking of any kind is more likely to fall into the category of things I have to do rather than the ones I choose to do, and I keep the whole at-home cooking-for-one thing pretty simple.  Usually, a microwave meal suffices, and I even regard spending the 8 minutes the machine takes to prepare it for me as an ordeal.  There are so many more exciting things to do with your life, don’t you agree, gentlemen?

This said, one word in the title of a recent ‘CB’ recipes sent me into research gear recently, and it was the country that inspired her article about coconut fish  (►►►).  Her attempt was inspired by the Independence Day of Nauru, a country she purported never to have heard of before coming across it online.

I had just heard of it, too, when I read her latest escapade, but the title of her post got me googling.

Did you know that it is the third smallest country in the world? There are two smaller ones, although we Brits are much more likely to have heard of them.  

Vatican City and Monaco rank number one and two in the smallest world country top-ten, but they are closer to home geographically and have histories that we are more likely to learn a little about at school.  Don’t dismiss Nauru; our British history has intermingled with theirs.  They experienced a short taste of British control, not to mention that of Australia and New Zealand.     This island is in the Pacific Ocean, is rich in phosphates, and has a population of about 12,000 people. They are, on average, rated as one of the heaviest nations in the world, which proves that every World Nation’s history has to start somewhere, and each one can boast about being up there with the best when at least one set of rankings are measured… 

  
All this is pretty obscure stuff, but it proves that there is always something to learn and that the smallest has its claims to fame that are right up there among the biggest in at least one walk of life…

NW, Sydenham

NW passes on some of his newly learned facts…

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