In the normal run of things, the Guardian books desk is a logocentric location, but there are moments when even we are lost for words - and one of those moments arrived today, with this picture of Terry Pratchett and companion taking receipt of the 2012 Bollinger Wodehouse Prize.
As we reported last week, Pratchett won the prize for Snuff, his 39th Discworld novel, which lands our old friend Sam Vimes in the middle of a country house murder while on holiday.
Reviewing Snuff in the Guardian, AS Byatt wrote of Pratchett:
He is a master of complex jokes, good bad jokes, good dreadful jokes and a kind of insidious wisdom about human nature (and other forms of alien nature). I think his mad footnotes are there because he can't stop his mind whirring, and our whirring minds go with him. I read his books at a gallop and then reread them every time I am ill or exhausted
As Byatt also noted: "Snuff has pleasant and innocent connotations – as an old-fashioned stimulant to be kept in elegant boxes and snorted gracefully in society. It also means arbitrary and unpleasant deaths, as in snuff movies." To this list can now be added a gracefully snorting Gloucester old spot pig, henceforth to be known as Snuff.
