The death of Mishima / the birth of new Hula Hoops

I was reading an interview in an old magazine with a forensics expert the other day and he was asked to name the strangest fact that he'd found out in his job. His answer was quite unexpected, nothing grizzly at all: it was that most suicides remove their shoes before killing themselves.

Today I was reminded of the extraordinary way in which Japanese writer Yukio Mishima ended his life. Having finished the the final book in his Sea of Fertility tetralogy, he dropped the completed manuscript off at his publishers and went to the Tokyo headquarters of Japan's Self-Defense Force where he read a manifesto, and committed seppuku, ritual suicide, disembowelling himself with a sword, after which a colleague cut his head off.

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Hula Hoops have brought out a new flavour of crisps, called Sheriff's Saucy Ribs. The packet is an unlikely mauve pink colour, but it's the crisps themselves that really shock in the colour department. It's insane: they look almost radioactive. The taste? Saucy, with hints of bacon, reminiscent of a long summer day spent with a new lover lying on an empty green expanse of grass.