Elven
Like many, I have just read The Hobbit again, which I hadn’t done since reading it to Veronica as a girl. Even when solemn, Tolkien knows what he is doing with language. It was at his most relaxed that...
View ArticleCoffee house
In the series of radio programmes on culture, a guest of Melvyn Bragg’s declared that the distinction between high and low culture was never strict, as a Wagner opera was first performed in a music...
View ArticleBreaded cats
I don’t know whether people know what belling the cat means now. In an allusive language like ours, some references sink out of sight. But the old tale is that a council of mice resolved to hang a bell...
View ArticleLang Syne
Those of us who only pronounce the words auld lang syne on New Year’s Eve and have a vague grasp of their grammatical function may be cheered by a sign at Ballyhalbert in Co. Down that reads: ‘Shore...
View ArticleOnesie
The onesie has brought Britain one step nearer fainéant infantilism than the slanket. The slanket, a portmanteau of sleeved and blanket, reached a height of popularity in 2009. It looked like a monk’s...
View ArticleVulnerable
‘I’m a vulnerable adult,’ said my husband when I asked him why he was shouting the other morning. He had spilt some water from the hot kettle on his slippered foot. Unlike Achilles, his vulnerability...
View ArticleElectrification of the ring fence
At the age of 55, Gervase Markham set off to walk from London to Berwick without using any bridge or boat, and without swimming, but relying only on a staff to help him leap. That was in 1622. When he...
View ArticleRelease
The centenary of George Barker’s birth was mentioned in the Times Literary Supplement recently. His ‘first two books — one of verse, the other prose — were released in 1933’. Released? Isn’t that what...
View ArticleContamination
A shrouded skull flanked by serpents above a tureen inscribed with the words, ‘There is death in the pot’ (2 Kings 4:40), ornaments the title page of A Treatise on the Adulterations of Food by...
View ArticleLurch
My husband made a little joke. ‘There’s no such thing as a free lurch,’ he said, looking up from his Sunday Telegraph. In it, David Cameron had declared: ‘The battle for Britain’s future will not be...
View ArticleChallenging
‘Pistols at dawn,’ said my husband, flapping a pair of Marigold rubber gloves from the other side of the kitchen. ‘I don’t want to know what you mean by that,’ I replied, hoping not to encourage him....
View ArticleOut
I managed to grab the TLS last week before my husband stuffed it in his overcoat pocket and lost it at his club. It had a very enjoyable review by Sir Brian Vickers of the Cambridge edition of Ben...
View ArticleLumpen
A publisher, Kevin Mayhew, has written to The Tablet, which is not a computer journal but a weekly magazine of interest to Catholics, complaining that the newly revised translation of the Mass is...
View ArticleMistakes
I enjoy Poetry Please, but was shouting mildly at the wireless the other day when a northern woman poet was using the whining intonation that some seem to think the proper voice in which to recite...
View ArticleEngland
Who, my husband asked, expects every man will do his duty? He was responding to the interesting and important question that Charles Moore raised last week about the name of the country if Scotland...
View ArticleResilience
They were talking on the wireless about Brazilians in the flooded areas, or so I thought. Once the kettle had finished boiling, it turned out that they wanted resilience in new houses in floody places....
View ArticleMcBess
My husband was surprised by quite a bit when we travelled by Underground in London the other day. Although he has a Nelson Mandela Memorial Freedom Pass, he seldom chooses to join us Morlocks down...
View ArticleDe-escalate
‘What we want to see,’ David Cameron said last week, ‘is a de-escalation.’ Or, as the Tanaiste of Ireland put it: ‘If the Russian authorities do not de-escalate this crisis, the EU will take...
View ArticleMandorla
‘Ask your telephone,’ said my husband satirically when I made an innocent enquiry on a point of fact. My telephone was having a little rest, since it had run out of juice in the annoyingly capricious...
View ArticleFlip
What kind of scientists do school inspectors not need to be? ‘Inspectors don’t need to be rocket scientists.’ For what must we make sure that the school inspection regime is fit? ‘We make sure that the...
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