able was I ere I saw elba

You might be surprised to know that the owner of Napoleon's penis has just died, in Englewood New Jersey. I'm not sure Englewood, New Jersey, was even extant at the same time as the small (no info given on that score) man himself. The owner in question was apparently a collector of many interesting artefacts, including Hermann Goering's cyanide capsule. The New York Times comment page, making out that it is somehow primitive to invest objects with residual power related to their previous existence, feels that enough is more than enough. In short, that Napoleon's willy should be returned and laid to rest with the rest of him.

I'm not sure I agree. No one who calls themselves Baroque* should make a reliable proponent of minimalism, so I can hold my head high: I own all sorts of strange things. I have a pre-Revolutionary 200-ruble note, a thousand-year-old Mexican temple god, an Iceni coin, a wedding-night negligee my Great-Aunt Bertha (I think) wore, my grandmother's engagement ring, my great-grandmother (on the other side)'s engagement ring, a memo my grandmother wrote to her friends when I was born, and antique dolls and doll heads from different eras (the heads, I should say, are popular only with me); I have things that have been blessed, things that have been signed (Richard Ford, Joseph Brodsky, Marcel Marceau), and a small phial of holy water (courtesy of my friend Ms Rational Self-Determinism, who despite her name is a devout Catholic; so much for CBT!); I wear a cross; I have a collected edition of Dr Johnson from 1821, and if I didn't believe in relics there would be no reason to have that. I even still have the fork with the bent tines that was my special favourite when I was little!

Let them do what they will with Napoleon's privates (har har), as he would certainly have done with them: I'm certainly the wrong person to ask!

* In fact, this was originally done for me. All I have done is not buck the trend.