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The real reason dating apps are so flawed

My father once attended a dinner for 12 where an intense argument arose over splitting the bill. After 15 minutes, a happy compromise emerged, at which point one diner, someone an order of magnitude richer than everyone else at the table, piped up with: “But I didn’t have any wine.” This is the perfect example of a valid consideration being introduced at completely the wrong point in the process. Bear this in mind, because I think there is an optimistic and relatively benign way to look at Britain’s bureaucratic sclerosis without hanging every public-sector employee from their own lanyard.

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: how do I tell friends I haven’t lost weight using Ozempic?

Q. We have made friends with a very unpopular local man and would like to skewer the myths about him by inviting others to meet him. The background is that we moved to the country from London last year so our children could go to a decent (free) day school and consequently our social life has very much centered on fellow parents. But over the summer we have been seeing our neighboring landowner, also a newcomer, who we had been told was poisonous company. We have found him adorable! My husband resents the idea that, if we invite him to a supper party, we should have to run his name past other potential guests as though asking for permission to include him. But not warning people he will be there could lead to awkwardness on the night. What do you advise?

Ruari Clark

I’m a grockle and proud

“How long have they been here?” “Three generations.” “Ah, just grockles, then.” Exchanges such as this must have taken place in countless Devon villages. A “grockle” is a Devonshire term for a tourist or incomer. I suppose it could be offensive. But being called a grockle is not usually a term of abuse and in general, the word is spoken with a half-smile rather than a grimace. Not least because, in Devon at least, ceasing to be a grockle and becoming its opposite – the local lad or girl – is a generational endeavor. I am definitely a grockle. I moved to Devon from Huntingdonshire when I was 20 to work on a dairy farm near East Worlington.

Dot Wordsworth

The internet is wrong about taxis

Error sticks to the word taxi like an ant to an echidna’s tongue. I once heard a cabby on the wireless explain that the word taxi came from its German inventor, whose name was Thurn und Taxis. This blunder swarms all over the internet. “At the end of the 18th century,” goes one version, “the Thurn und Taxis family, who managed thousands of carriages and horses with which they distributed mail, decided to diversify their business, using their network and their vehicles also for passenger transport… Their name, Taxis, may have inspired the modern term taxi…” But it didn’t. The Thurn und Taxis family did run international postal services. Their family names meant Tower and Badger, but they did not invent those either.

And Finally