That sympathetic physician, Sir Thomas Browne, thought himself austere in conversation. ‘Yet, at my devotion,’ he confessed in Religio Medici (from the 1630s), ‘I love to use the civility of my knee, my hat, and hand, with all those outward and sensible motions which may express or promote my invisible devotion.’ His hat he took
‘So my poor wife rose by five o’clock in the morning, before day, and went to market and bought fowls and many other things for dinner, with which I was highly pleased,’ wrote Samuel Pepys on 13 January 1667. They were eight. ‘I had for them, after oysters, at first course, a hash of rabbits,
Whenever I turned on the news last weekend, my husband took to humming the March to the Scaffold from the Symphonie fantastique. He was expecting a political decapitation. Political metaphors tend to the violent: toast, under a bus, the high jump. Berlioz didn’t use échafaud, ‘scaffold’, in the title of his movement, but supplice, ‘torment’.
I Hoovered on Saturday (or vacuumed as they say in newspapers eager to avoid using a trademark) while my husband was out ‘exercising’. I don’t know whether he attracts dust, like a piece of amber, or produces it, as if by spontaneous combustion in slow motion. Anyway, when he settled in his chair again, he
In the game of ‘U’ and ‘Non-U’, begun by Alan S.C. Ross (1907-80) and popularised in Nancy Mitford’s volume Noblesse Oblige, some words embody upper-class usage (U), and some definitely do not. To the Non-U toilet and serviette might be added floor in the sense of the ground outdoors. Did Boris Johnson succumb to Non-U
‘We can now see the sunlight and the pasture ahead of us,’ said Boris Johnson on our escape from a tunnel under an Alpine peak. One could almost hear the cowbells and the echo of a yodel. From schooldays the Prime Minister will remember in chapel the Psalm ‘The Lord is my shepherd’, which declares:
‘Is this not the oddest news?’ Harriet Smith exclaimed to Emma Woodhouse, on the news that Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill were to be married. ‘Did you ever hear any thing so strange?’ Those two words, strange and odd, are being used almost universally about the quality of the past few weeks. Odd is Scandinavian
In July, in its ‘Guess the definition’ slot, next to the day’s birthdays, the Daily Mail asked its readers to plump for the correct meaning of furlough. Was it a) a second swarm of bees in a season; b) a pole across a stream to stop cattle; c) a soldier’s leave of absence? I think
My husband left a copy of The Spectator open on the table by his chair, next to the little cardboard mat with a browning glass-ring on it where for most hours of the day he keeps his whisky glass. It was of course open at the letters page, where a kind-hearted reader expressed a most
My husband is fond of an old pub in Northumberland called the Red Lion, once a drovers’ inn, it says. In fact my husband is fond of lots of pubs, many of them unattractive. The red (or gules) lion of the Scottish royal banner is rampant, ‘rearing up’. This rampancy is connected in complicated ways
My husband has special ‘throwing socks’. They are a rolled-up pair of woolly hiking socks. He does not hike. He used to throw a slipper at the television, and I feared he would graduate to a whisky glass. So I introduced the socks, like a sort of dog toy. The latest target has been the
‘Why can’t you write about something wholesome?’ asked my husband, in a flanking move. He was in a bad mood because his offer to come out of retirement to save the NHS had not so much been rebuffed as received with uneasy amusement. It so happened that I had been rereading something that might fit
I pictured the Green Book (which Rishi Sunak has been urged to tear up) as a matt card-bound thing like an exercise book at school (in which the staples might be rusty from storage). The thing now has a virtual existence. Engagingly subtitled ‘Appraisal and evaluation in central government’, it had been a real paperback
My husband tried to identify in the 2011 census as ‘housewife’. Luckily I grabbed the form when he had dozed off and put him down as ‘economically inactive’. At bottom, housewife is no more demeaning than husband. Husband is compounded of the elements hus, ‘house’, and bond, ‘householder’. Housewife has the elements house, ‘house’, and
‘Somebody loves me,’ said my husband, waving a copy of The Spectator above his head as though pursued by wasps. ‘Don’t be silly, darling,’ I said, refusing to feed his appetite for vicarious fame. A kindly reader had written, wondering if he was well, since I hadn’t mentioned him for a couple of weeks. He
Before the Covid-19 scare I never thought that one particular Spanish proverb would come in useful. It goes: ‘Los ojos con los codo.’ This hardly seems to make sense, ‘Eyes with the elbows’, but the great 19th-century traveller Richard Ford explains in his Gatherings from Spain that the sun’s glare on the dusty land may
Facebook recently told readers of the Sun that satellites could ‘bring broadband connectivity to rural regions where internet connectivity is lacking’. Sajid Javid in happier days not long ago told the Telegraph that HS2 would ‘create greater North-South connectivity’. Connectivity seems an unnecessarily abstract way of expressing it. E.M. Forster didn’t attach the epigraph ‘Only
In Arnold Bennett’s Tales of the Five Towns, a young dog called Ellis Carter takes a girl for a drive in a dogcart (a little open carriage pulled by a horse, not a dog, the use of which for traction was made illegal in 1854) on a Sunday afternoon, until the spirited mare he is
Billie Eilish, who has just won five Grammys, is also singing the theme song for the next Bond film. ‘James Bond is the coolest film franchise ever to exist,’ she said. ‘I’m still in shock.’ My husband tells me that the symptoms of shock include pale, clammy skin and bluish fingernails. Since Miss Eilish’s fingernails
At this time of year in Colorado the crime of puffing is widespread. It is so cold that in the morning people often leave the car engine running to warm it up while they finish getting ready indoors. This is called puffing. It leads to dozens of cars being stolen. Characteristically, the police penalise victims,
