>… read the obituaries in the Daily Telegraph.

Now, you might question the value in all this, but I had not the slightest clue that Joyce Lambert was a “botanist whose research revealed that the Norfolk Broads were created not by nature but by man” nor that Major-General the Rev Ian Durie was “Britain’s artillery commander in the Gulf who rose to become a curate at Battersea”. (I especially liked the “rose to become a curate” bit….).

Or that Lieutenant-Commander John Russell “denied that he had amputated his own leg using his commando dagger, instead claiming to have used “a couple of sizeable bits of tibia or femur that I seemed to have spare” to attract the attention of some scurrying Americans” at Anzio.

Pretty habit-forming, mind you, and it could be construed as morbid curiosity, but some of this stuff is going to turn up on Trivial Pursuit one day, which in itself is a valued-added, as we say in the business.

But then there’s the seriously good stuff.

Ian Durie’s thesis for his PhD, for example.

Could I have lived happily without reading it.

Probably.

Did it enrich my life?

Definitely.

Valued-added doesn’t begin to describe it.