Hannah Tomes

For many, the first Baileys of the year heralds the start of the festive season; to others, it’s a drink to be consumed only when the temperature drops into single digits. A bottle lasts up to 24 months — opened or unopened, refrigerated or not — and it is an essential component of any worthwhile drinks cabinet. A few weeks ago, Morrisons announced a Christmas deal: Baileys at £10 a litre. To a Baileys fanatic like me, it was quite the call to action. I looked up my closest store — a 38-minute walk away. This seemed a stroke of luck considering the scarcity of Morrisons in London; perhaps it was a sign. Arriving at the super-market, I made a beeline for the spirits section and bought two litres of Baileys. That should see me through the month.

Last week a gentle Norfolk waterway got into trouble with Facebook. The problem was its name — Cockshoot Dyke. Facebook’s relentless algorithms blocked posts that mentioned the dyke and issued notifications warning about ‘sexual content’ and ‘violence’. The name of this stretch of water isn’t, of course, actually rude at all. It relates to a fowl-hunting term for a broad glade through which woodcock might fly. The joy of supposedly ‘rude’ place names lies in their innocence. The village of Upperthong, near Huddersfield, is named after the Old English words uferra (upper) and thwang (a narrow strip of land), while Twatt in Orkney comes from the Old Norse þveit, meaning ‘small piece of land’.