The guns of August | The Spectator

My top tips for Andy Burnham

I am cautiously optimistic about Britain’s new leader. For one thing, the fact that Andy Burnham went to Cambridge not Oxford, did not study PPE, is not a lawyer and did not grow up in Surrey makes him something of a diversity-hire among our more recent prime ministers. This gives us hope. It is a near-universal law of problem-solving that you cannot think your way out of problems using the same mindset that created them in the first place. One tip: government needs a marketing function. Rather than explaining itself to the public, it has endlessly sought to cadge publicity by ingratiating itself with the news media. As all journalists since Watergate are largely motivated by discrediting those in power, this is hopeless.

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: what should I do if I run into my ex on holiday?

Q. A woman I have known for many years and who helped look after my mother has just had her leg amputated. One Saturday this month, she is out of hospital and is throwing a late birthday party at her farm with a hog roast etc. to celebrate. However, I have invited a schoolfriend to stay that weekend, and she has pancreatic cancer. Would it be very rude to go to the party for a short time? I have a charming, polite, gay man as my other house guest to keep my schoolfriend company.– E.S., Sussex A. Never underestimate the fun of spending unsupervised time in someone else’s house. Your guests would be delighted if you went out to a party. However, don’t be tempted to raise the topic of rival health conditions and which one trumps which. There could be no useful outcome.

Ella Veakins

There’s no excuse for a plastic plant

Monstera deliciosa, otherwise known as the Swiss cheese plant, is perhaps the most popular houseplant of them all, probably because it’s so easy to care for. In normal circumstances, you almost have to try to mess it up. A heatwave, however, can put a monstera under stress. Subject one to warm weather for too long and you’ll find its poor leaves scorched, its roots damaged and its stems desperately dehydrated. For this reason, you might feel the temptation to turn to a shockingly popular alternative: the plastic plant. It should be resisted at all costs. A potted history takes us back to the 1950s, when a postwar manufacturing boom saw the mass production of cheap polyvinyl chloride and polyethylene.

Dot Wordsworth

Fantasticks, calash, noctivagation – the wonderful words of Anthony Wood

When the King visited Oxford in September 1687, there was a bit of a shambles in the Bodleian, where they had laid out a banquet for his breakfast. He ate some mutton and pheasant. When he had finished, there was a scramble for the many dishes left over. The University had paid £160 for this banquet or ambigue, noted the antiquarian Anthony Wood. Ambigue, borrowed from French ambigu, meant a meal where all the dishes were served at once. It appears in the fifth index, “Words,” printed in 1900 in a 400-page volume of indexes to Wood’s Life and Times edited by the indefatigable Andrew Clark, who claimed “a little space for words and spellings characteristic of Wood,” and for “a few minor subjects” not in the other indexes.

And Finally