The other day I was expounding the dangers of fruit at dinner. What dangers of fruit I was asked. Well, I said, just consider the fate of President Zachary Taylor. He died after eating rotten cherries.

The fact that he also dank off milk probably has to be taken into consideration too. But for the purposes of my argument I thought it would be best to ignore it.

But thinking about Zachary Taylor reminded me of an interesting character from the footnotes of history. A man called David Rice Atchison.

Zachary Taylor was quite a religious man and so when he was elected president he chose not to be sworn in on a Sunday. Nobody thought much about it at the time but then a newspaper with some pace to fill wrote a story on the subject in a kind of "what if" type of situation of "who was the president for that Sunday". In trying to work it out they made a fundamental couple of errors. Such as ignoring that the President elect was actually the president as you don't have to be sworn in at all. Also in finding the next person after the president and vice president (they were excluded because they had already seemed their four years). They forgot to notice that the senate was dissolved but anyway they decided that it was David Rice Atchison. And so they dubbed him the President for a day.

Interestingly when Atchison was asked to comment on his presidency he thought that probably nobody was the president that day but that sort of thing didn't matter anyway.

And so to what he did on the day? He said, "I went to bed. There had been two or three busy nights finishing up the work of the senate, and I slept most of that Sunday".