Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Let’s say you’re a young woman working in London, and you own a one-bedroom flat in Islington. You fall in love with a chap who has a nice house in Devon. You marry him.  As soon as you do that, you’ll no longer be allowed to park your car outside your Islington flat in the daytime, except on a meter for a maximum stay of two hours. A married couple is only permitted one primary residence between them, and the larger country house will most likely be designated the main home. In all central London boroughs (not just Camden as in this example), you’re not eligible for a resident’s parking permit if the dwelling is your second home, even though you pay the full council tax. Worse: you’ll soon be paying double the council tax.

On top of the canings and endless gym-shoe whackings – those ‘short, sharp shock’ corporal punishments endured by prep-school children (especially boys) until the late 1970s – what were the most memorable punishments inflicted on pupils born from the 1930s onwards? To put today’s more humane prep-school punishments in perspective (they’re not even called punishments but ‘sanctions’), I asked people in their seventies and above which punishments they most remembered. ‘The Denzil Blip,’ said Julian Campbell, who was at The Hall School in London in the 1950s. ‘Denzil Packard had been a prisoner of war of the Japanese and had a mangled finger. Offending boys were clipped on the head, with this finger being the point of contact.

Perhaps because more and more BBC radio programmes are being broadcast from Salford, the whole of Britain is getting used to hearing multiple uses of the expression ‘I was sat’ or ‘I was stood’. Often, those words come at the very beginning of programmes, spoken by the presenter to set the scene. ‘I’m sat in a crowded pub’, ‘I’m sat in the back of a van on a lay-by’, ‘I’m stood in the rain on the outskirts of Oldham, waiting for…’ To those who live south of the Watford Gap services, this simply sounds grammatically wrong. It’s a misuse of the passive voice. It should be ‘I was sitting’ or ‘I was standing’.

To call Gregg Wallace a ‘national treasure’, as some did after his fall from grace last week, was inaccurate. Just because he is (or was) very popular on television does not qualify him. To attain national treasure status, a person needs to be older, as well as much nicer. The expression is vastly overused, lavished on too many undeserving celebrities, and it needs to be reined in. As Julie Burchill (sick to death of them last Christmas) wrote, ‘it seems harder to name a public figure who isn’t one’, and that most of them ‘can’t open their cake-holes without mouthing centrist platitudes which we’ve all heard a million times before’. David Attenborough is the yardstick.

The feverishness of the private prep-school market in London has reached such a pitch that children in the nursery class at Eaton House Belgravia are being prepared for the seven-plus from the age of two. ‘Some of them are still in nappies, and some of them still need a nap,’ the headmaster Ross Montague tells me. ‘We have folding camp beds, and our lovely nursery team of six teachers deal with that.

Gawping at the famous sights of the Cotswolds has been a popular pastime for centuries. So too is writing about the huge numbers of people gawping at the famous sights of the Cotswolds. The Times, Telegraph, Express and the BBC have all covered the explosion of mass-tourism since the pandemic, which is driven mainly by social media algorithms bombarding the globe with irresistible Cotswolds images. You can now tour the Cotswolds to gawp at the sight of thousands of other people gawping, or buy a paper and gawp at a professional gawper gawping at gawpers.