Will Brown
Will Brown
life matter mean telling turn turtle
Words have a life of their own. There is no telling what they will do. Within a matter of days, they can even turn turtle and mean the opposite.
expect onions school sticks strings wear
When I was young, I used to expect Parisians to wear little black berets, to bicycle about with strings of onions around their necks, and to brandish long sticks of bread, just like they used to do in school textbooks.
time
There's nothing wrong with procrastination. Or is there? I'll leave it to you to decide, but only if you have the time.
arm breakfast childhood free happiest looking moments spent
Looking back, some of the happiest moments of my childhood were spent with my arm in packets of breakfast cereal, rootling around for a free gift.
blazer bowls people played school wore
In its heyday, the blazer had come to symbolise a kind of conventional decency. Yacht club commodores and school bursars wore blazers. People who played bowls wore blazers.
area cloak itself jealousy memoirs might religion tends though
You might think that religion was the one area in which professional jealousy would take a back seat. But no: ecclesiastical memoirs are as viperish as any, though their envy tends to cloak itself in piety.
became blazer firm handshake originally people preferred straight symbol trust
Like the firm handshake and looking people straight in the eye, the blazer had originally been a symbol of trust. Because of this, it had been purloined by the less-than-trustworthy and became their preferred disguise.
battalion cameron landed
My father, a captain in the 5th Battalion of the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders, landed in Normandy the day after D-Day.
alike dinner evening guests hosts party somewhere source spent television untold watching
Somewhere in the back of their minds, hosts and guests alike know that the dinner party is a source of untold irritation, and that even the dullest evening spent watching television is preferable.
considered generally
Poets, for example, are generally considered starry-eyed and sensitive, but only by those who have never encountered one.
people though
When I tell people I don't own a mobile phone and wouldn't know how to text, they react as though I have just confessed that I can't read.
bringing clear consulting dictionary generally insisted irritated occurs opponents placed scrabble throughout
Often, I grow irritated before the first tile has been placed on the Scrabble board. This generally occurs when one of my opponents has insisted upon bringing a dictionary to the table, making it clear that he will be consulting it throughout the game.
deciding five further good minutes speaking spend ten whether
Speaking for myself, I spend a good ten minutes a day deciding whether or not to read the results of new surveys, and, once I have read them, a further five minutes deciding whether or not to take them seriously.
catty consummate literary
Historians are the consummate hairdressers of the literary world: cooing in public, catty in private.