It seems improbable never to have been told in Lidl or even in M&S, "Go on ahead there: you've only a few things." And yet, even holding just two emergency boxes of Jaffa cakes wasn't enough to qualify for favour.

At the end of the day the fishmonger offered me two big ray wings for nothing. I declined, since I dislike it, and asked 'Do you eat it yourself?' They grimaced. Skate is, I think, the executive chefs' euphemism for it. Skate. Shudder. And yet in Dublin the natives lay back their ears to it.

Suddenly everyone has gone mad for dark green: wearing it and slapping it on walls. I remember dark grey. Why, I even remember magnolia. "We wanted to put our own stamp on the house."

A sona'ah for cello and piano.

Crotchet = 10 more in the minute can make such a difference.

Andrew inhabits radio in the most perfectly natural way.

Impatient in the historical building until you can get to the relief of the gift shop, you load up on books, with a bias towards the dry, monochrome and scholarly rather than the popular and accessible. These you heave home through airports. Today, seven weeks on, they go into the recycling.

"Who the hell says 'utilise'?" "It's a word!"

Even in extempore conversation in a radio studio, Dr Michael Wood the historian has the same light and languid yet informationally substantial way of speaking that characterised his telly work. A. J. P. Taylor, they say, had that gift too.

When I began my editing career, I often changed “utilize” to “use.” For the past eight years or so, I’ve been changing “leverage” to “use.” Now I’m changing “use case” to the noun “use.” What do you people have against “use” in its various forms? It’s a perfectly fine word.

They weren't all equally bad but they were all equally ignored.