I started reading the Booker shortlist as an annual project in the 1980s. I saw it a personal, horizon-widening exercise. As a reader, as with so much else in life, it’s all too easy to like what you know and know what you like. And some of the discoveries were wonderful. I first read, for example, David Lodge, Carol Shields and Peter Carey because one of their titles was shortlisted. I then went on and read everything else of theirs I could lay hands along with their new titles as they appeared.

In early 1989 when Salman Rushie and The Satanic Verses hit the headlines because of the fatwa demanding his execution for blasphemy, I was the only person I knew who had actually read it. it had been shortlisted for Booker the previous autumn. It didn’t win although Chairman of the Judges, Michael Foot, made it clear that he thought it should have done. Personally, I didn’t enjoy it very much but took the view as that if you don’t like it, or don’t think you will, then don’t read it. But nothing gives you the right to stop, or try to stop, other people reading a book – any book. Of course, though, I am not a religious extremist and see things differently.

Another good reason for reading those shortlists was that I was teaching secondary English to GCSE and A Level, and it meant I could talk to my students about current titles as I tried to encourage them to follow my example and try books which were not necessarily within the habitual comfort zone – because therein can often lurk new treasures. I always regarded developing wider reading as almost as important as getting everyone through the exam although, naturally, I did that too.

Since I stopped teaching to become a full-time writer in 2004 I have got out of the Booker shortlist habit although I have usually read the winner and sometimes one or two of the others if I liked the sound of them. This year, however, the final announcement is not until 26 November. The shortlist was announced on 21 September which meant there was full two months to get acquainted with the books. So I did.

It’s strong, beautifully diverse list:

Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein (Canadian)

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery (American)

The Other Eden by Paul Harding (American)

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch (Irish)

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray (Irish)

Western Lane by Chetna Maroo (British Indian).

I found things to like in them all but the one which moved, shocked and haunted me most was Prophet Song.

We’re in Ireland in the present day when a totalitarian regime is elected. Changes are small to start with, as ordinary citizens’ rights begin to disappear. It made me think, initially, of the pandemic, lockdown and government emergency edicts. Of course the situation rapidly gets worse and you know that nothing is going to get any better for the family at the heart of it: Eilish, a scientist, her husband Larry who’s a teacher/trade unionist and their children Mark, Molly, Bailey and Ben. Suddenly it’s a world of torture, death, sudden disappearance, corruption and suffering. And the arrival of the rebels to overturn the regime doesn’t make any discernible difference for families on the ground. What Lynch has done is to retell the story of Syria in a European context and I’m deeply ashamed of what it says about me that I found this much more disturbing than anything I’ve ever read about horrendous atrocities thousands of miles away.

The depiction of Eilish’s despair and declining mental health is masterly. I suffered every shred of the horror with her – especially when she goes in search of 12-year-old Bailey. That will stay with me for a very long time. The novel ends in bleak, ambiguous hope, tempered with horror and anxiety.

I read it in just a couple of days – it’s very compelling. On the first night I slept for an hour, then woke up instantly alert because I thought sometime was flashing a torch and shouting up aggressively from the garden. It took me a few minutes to recognise that I’d been dreaming. Perhaps I shouldn’t read novels as powerful as Prophet Song just before I put the light out but it is testament to its strength.

So this is the book which would get my vote, if I were on the judging panel. I suspect, though, that the prize will go to Sarah Bernstein for Study for Obedience which is original, edgy, topical because its protagonist is Jewish, and written in an unusual style, It just didn’t hit me between the eyes me as much as Prophet Song did.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Stop Them Dead by Peter James

Show: The Loaf

Society: London (professional shows)

Venue: The Bridge House Theatre. Bridge House, 2 High Street, London SE20 8RZ

Credits: By Alan Booty

The Loaf

4 stars

This 70 minute, two hander play has matured a lot since I saw it last year at Jack Studio. Playwright Alan Booty, who also plays Hermann and directs, has found ways of making it seem much more natural and less awkward.

We’re in Hamburg, two years after the end of World War Two. Food is in very short supply. Hermann wakes in the night and, unbearably hungry, sneaks into the kitchen for a piece of bread although the small loaf has to “last until Thursday”. His wife, Martha (Joanna Karlsson) hears him moving about and comes to see what’s up. What follows is a long conversation in which we learn about privation, loss, fear, life under the Nazis and the relationship between a couple who’ve been married for 39 years.

Booty finds a child-like impishness in Hermann – using silly jokes as a way of covering his character’s refusal to succumb to despair under awful circumstances. Karlsson, meanwhile, gives us a Martha who is variously anxious, decent, caring, maternal and desperately worried about her own elderly mother in Russia-controlled Berlin. Her active, finely nuanced listening while Hermann is talking beautifully done. They, are, in this revised version of the play a totally convincing couple. Apparently childless, they have lived through two world wars. They have only each other and we sense that, despite occasional exasperation they will live on peacefully together. She is distressed, for example, that he has sold his father’s ring for a few vegetables and a small bottle of schnapps but later he tells her, for the first time, how much he hated his father. They are still learning about each other – with tenderness and affection.

The dialogue now flows believably because Booty has dropped any attempt to mimic German syntax in English. Instead, both characters speak in gentle, quite subtle but well sustained German accents and the dialogue is peppered with German words which seem to lie happily in the context. As a device, it works well. And the pacing is adeptly managed.

Rose Balp has done a good job with evocative props and costumes too. The bread board is vintage and in period, a fresh loaf is placed on it at every performance and she knitted the slippers to a 1940s pattern.

I enjoyed this reworking of a thoughtful play very much. I’m, glad moreover that a decision was made to open and close with Beethoven’s piano sonata Op 27 no 2 (“Moonlight”) because it sets the scene at several levels. C# minor connotes the poignant but ultimately positive mood beautifully.

First published by Sardines https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/the-loaf-2/

Show: Owners

Society: London (professional shows)

Venue: Jermyn Street Theatre. 16b Jermyn Street, London SW1Y 6ST

Credits: Caryl Churchill

Owners

3 stars

Photo: Steve Gregson

This early (1972) Caryl Churchill play hasn’t had many outings over the years which is a pity because it’s sharp, very funny and remains topical – in a country in which property ownership is still, for many, life’s ultimate goal.

Clegg (Mark Huckett), a butcher, is fed up with his property tycoon wife, Marion (Laura Doddington) and fantasises about killing her. Alec (Ryan Donaldson) and Lisa (Boadicea Ricketts), with whom relations are doubly complicated, are her tenants. Worsley (Tom Morley) works for Marion and Clegg. Also in the mix, in much smaller roles, are Alec’s mother (Pearl Marsland) who has dementia and Mrs Arlington, a neighbour (Laura Woodhouse). What evolves from this is a dark – there’s a lot about death – comedy which explores ownership in every sense.

Now let me get this out of the way first. I do not find dementia-based comedy remotely funny and although the audience responded with gales of laughter I was distinctly unamused by the scene in which Pearl Marsland’s pitiful character attempts to make tea. Surely, in this age of much greater Alzheimer’s awareness, this could have been toned down rather than hammed up?

Otherwise this is an engaging 135 mins of theatre featuring some good performances. Doddington gives us a magnificently rounded Marion, outrageously used to getting her own way but also with unfulfilled needs and desires – which don’t include her ghastly husband. There’s fine work too from Tom Morley whose Worsley is hilariously deadpan and lugubrious. He has tried and failed to die by suicide so often that it has become a joke as he sustains more and more injuries – or maybe not, come to think of it, for anyone who has actually had to deal with suicide in someone close to them.

Cat Fuller’s design is delightful and very neat in Jermyn Street’s small space. She gives us a crescent of front doors, all different, to connote property and its importance. Some moveable items slide in and out of a hole where meters would be between two houses. Alec and Lisa’s bed emeges, like a drawer, from the air vent beneath two doors. Her 1970s costumes are lovely too – “expensive” brightly coloured outfits for Marion, simple plain dresses for Lisa and a tweedy brown suit for Worsley.

Photos: Steve Gregson
First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/owners/

I wouldn’t normally write about a single short story here but this one is such a gem I think it deserves a space all of its own. Actually it’s a miniature masterpiece structured like a tiny novel in twelve mini-chapters. So that’s my excuse – if I need one.

Written in 1920, The Daughters of the Late Colonel was published in 1921 by John Murry to whom Mansfield was married. She was from New Zealand but settled in England in 1918. She and Murry were close friends of DH Lawrence and his wife Freda – all four of them convention breakers. Aged 34, she died of tuberculosis in 1923 as Lawrence would seven years later. It was a hideously common disease.

The titular daughters are Constantia and Josephine whose domineering father has just died. They are virgins in their fifties – their younger brother is old enough to have an adult son. Their mother has been dead for 35 years. But they have no emotional maturity so they still share a room, giggle like nervous teenagers and struggle with everyday tasks and decisions. They are, moreover, limited by genteel poverty. It’s beautifully imagined and observed – and extraordinarily poignant.

These women were terrified of their father, who has dominated their lives, and Mansfield drips in flashbacks to show how awful it was as the reader is allowed to look “past” them objectively. Now they are frightened even to “trespass” in his bedroom even though he’s dead. He’s been the dominant presence in their arid lives for so long that they can’t switch him off.

They are frightened of the nurse who looked after the old man and allow her to take advantage of them. They’d like to sack the insolent maid Kate, who sees them as “old tabbies” but they haven’t the courage. They have never met their sister-in-law who lives with their brother in Ceylon but get occasional duty visits from their nephew, Cyril and these are painful, tortured occasions.

I think of The Daughters of the Late Colonel a lot when I struggle to communicate with deaf friends. It is true that once you have, perforce, repeated a piece of everyday, conversational trivia three times it begins to sound ridiculous so you give up usually to the fury of the person you’re trying to talk to. Then I remember Katharine Mansfield, Cyril and the meringues.

I know this story well because it features in many school anthologies and I used to teach it. Coming back to it now I marvel at the tension of sentences like this: “They only gave the blind a touch, but it flew up and the cord flew after rolling round the blindstick, and the little tassel tapped as if trying to get free.” Of course, Mansfield, despite her early death, was a prolific story teller and since I first read this one – still my favourite – I have read most of the others in various collections and more recently in Katharine Mansfield: The Collected Stories with introduction by Ali Smith (Penguin Classics,2007) which is a fat 700-page volume They’re all worth reading although some are stronger than others. And I don’t think she ever bettered The Daughters of the Late Colonel.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Whichever title of the six on the 2023 Booker Prize shortlist I have, by then, decided I like best!

19 Ocober 2023

Well if you wanted the cobwebs blown away, this all American programme, part of a series entitled Let Freedom Ring, would certainly do the trick. Freedom dominated the evening at every level. The repertoire was a long way from Mozart and Brahms, we watched/listened to the Philharmonia play syncopated jazz rhythms till the whole hall bounced and there was the wondrous joy of a soloist who is both black and blind.

Marin Alsop is beginning a new collaboration with the Philharmonia to develop some different and innovative projects. This concert was a resounding start and encouraging too because the Royal Festival Hall was fuller than I’ve seen it in quite a while.

We began with a Symphonic poem by James P Johnson of Charleston fame which gave us some virtuosic timpani playing and energetic kit drum work. Two hours later – ensemble and audience thoroughly warmed up – they rounded the concert off with another piece by Johnson, Victory Stride, with Alsop almost dancing as she excitedly raised sections of the orchestra to their feet to play their solos like a gigantic jazz band.

Back in the first half of the concert came a nod to European tradition with Samuel Barber’s single movement first symphony. Lush string work preceded a fine melody led by oboe and harp. Alsop is very attentive to each player and section, leaning on every mood change and nuance, moving round the podium to cue entries. She conducted the entire first half of this concert, incidentally, without score or even a music stand.

The second half started with Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man which was a nice showpiece for brass and percussion and a reminder of how rarely we hear this very familiar piece played live. It was then mirrored (sort of) by Joan Tower’s Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman (1986) which is dedicated to Alsop and involves some virtuosic, complex tongue work.

The big event, however, was Rhapsody in Blue. Now I’ve played the second violin part of Gershwin’s most famous piece and heard it many times in concert but this was a rendering like no other. Downstage behind Alsop on the podium was the Marcus Roberts Trio who gave us part-improvisatory cadenzas. In truth I would probably never have chosen to hear a jazz trio but in this context their work was spell-binding. Roberts, who has to be led onto the stage, is a sensitive, unshowy pianist finding depth and colour in the rhythms and subtleties of Gershwin’s themes. Martin Jaffe is a terrific bass player and Jason Marsalis a fine drummer – and my goodness, how well the three work together.

It must be daunting for Alsop to conduct a work of such complexity when she knows the main soloist can’t see her but she has, apparently, worked with Roberts a lot and they do it on breathing and body language. Interesting to see Jaffe, though, turning to look at her in almost every bar. Alsop exudes supreme confidence as well as establishing a friendly casual rapport with the audience. During the long cadenzas she simply and unshowily turned on her podium and watched him. The orchestra, meanwhile, played their familiar passages with a lot of incisive warmth.

And here’s my trivial woman thought for the evening: Alsop looks gloriously, unassumingly elegant in her scarlet-lined long jackets. But how on earth does she manage to do all that leaping around without the jacket riding up? I reckon she has them made with a generous extra gusset under the arms – like a classical male dancer’s blouson. Please can I have the name of her tailor?

National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine

Conductor: Volodymyr Sirenko

Pianist: Antonii Baryshevskyi

Fairfield Halls, Croydon

18 Ocotber 2023

This orchestra must be supported on its UK tour, I reasoned. So I gave up my regular Wednesday night (musical) commitment and took myself to Croydon. Clearly, many people agreed with me. There were audience members dressed in blue and yellow and, delightfully, lots of children – all silently rapt.

The NSOU’s style is distinctive. They were led formally on to the stage by their leader, Maksym Grinchenko, as the lights dimmed. Second violins sat to the right of the conductor with cellos next to the firsts and the harp at the heart of the orchestra.

This was my first visit to the concert hall at Fairfield Halls (although I’ve been to the Ashcroft Theatre several times) since its long closure and expensive refurb before the pandemic and I have to say that it is now acoustically superb. I should think Volodymyr Sirenko was pleased with the balance he and his band were able to achieve at this rather splendid concert in an outwardly unpromising venue on a wet October night.

First we got Richard Strauss’s tone poem Don Juan – a big sound and lots of passion with some especially pleasing work from trumpets. Sirenko coaxes effects from his players with his hands and doesn’t use a baton.

I think the fourth is my favourite of all Beethoven’s five piano concerti (although I am inclined to say that of which ever one I happen to be listening to). I love that beautiful piano solo entry which still feels unexpected even when you’ve heard it hundreds of times before. Soloist Antonii Baryshevskyi, who looks like a young Dante Gabriel Rossetti, found aching poignancy, especially in the big runs in the first movement. I was intrigued by the cadenza which was very different from the ones I’m used to. It wasn’t remotely Beethovenian but felt full of anguish until we reached the final trill which triggers the re-entry of the orchestra. I think it was probably a heartfelt political statement and wondered if Baryshevskyi wrote himself in the traditional way. Thereafter came a delicate slow movement, with exceptionally sensitive rapport between the conductor and soloist at every entry and a crisp transition into the Rondo. And I tried not to smile too much at Baryshevskyi’s black jeans, trainers and coloured socks while evey other player was conventionally, formally turned out in black with bow ties for men. His playing more than made up for any sartorial oddity.

The real discovery of the evening, though, came after the interval: the second symphony of Boris Lyatoshynsky, a Ukrainian composer who died in 1968 having, like Shostokovitch, lived and worked for many years under a regime which expected music to be “patriotic” rather than “decadently” experimental. All new music was required to conform to the doctrine of “socialist realism”.

Lyatoshynsky’s work was completely new to me. Dating from 1936 and revised in 1940, the second symphony is a compelling, three movement work of bleak tonality with a lot of angst lurking amongst the rich orchestral colours. Inevitably, it was not approved of and heard very little until the 1960s. The NSOU clearly now plays it as commitedly and knowledgably as the Vienna Philharmonic plays Strauss or the Czech Philharmonic plays Dvorak. It’s in the blood.

I particularly liked the cello solo in the first movement, the soulful brass canon in the third and the grandiloquent, heavy denouement with tubular bells. The NSOU’s double bass section is especially good. Positioned behind the cellos and first violins, they played every note – bowed or pizzicato – with panache and, unusually, it contributed a very vivid part of the texture. I sympathised with Sirenko at the end of the first movement, though – he evidently wanted no applause to break the mood and he was right.

It made sense, although it became a longer-than-average concert, to finish with Finlandia. Yes, it gave the audience something rousing and familiar to go home humming but more importantly it was written as a nationalistic statement in support of the independence movement in Finland. The Fins were resisting the Russians so it’s a good fit for NSOU now. And played with percussion and brass sections as strong as this orchestra has, it sounded incisively powerful.

It was one of my former A level student who emailed me around 2010. “Mrs Elkin, have you read this?” she asked excitedly. “If you haven’t I know you’ll love it. It made me think of you such a lot”.

Well I could hardly resist that, could I? So I bought Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (1998) and admired every word. It’s a witty series of essays about books, reading and the effect it has had on the author’s life. Anne Fadiman is an American journalist from a Very Bookish Background.

The quality of her writing is so magical that I hardly dare make the comparison but I’ve come back to Fadiman’s book now – with great pleasure – because I too have just finished a semi-autobiographical book about books and reading. All Booked Up: A Reading Retrospective will be published by The Book Guild on 28 March. I was asked by my publisher (standard practice) which other books/authors my new effort could be likened too. So I cited Anne Fadiman and of course, once I’d picked her book up again I had to read it right through.

She starts with a very amusing account of merging her personal library with her husband’s, several years after they got together. This “transfer of books across the Mason-Dixon Line that separated my northern shelves from his southern ones” was arguably a much more significant step for a pair of bibliophiles than sleeping or living together. George’s books “comingled democratically, united under the all inclusive flag of literature” whereas hers were “balkanised by nationality and subject matter”.

In other essays she writes about sitting in a restaurant with her parents and brother (like George and her two children, they feature a lot) where they all, habitually, vie with each other to spot the errors in the menu rather than choosing food – a whole family of soi-disant proof readers. I liked her essay about Gladstone, Victorian Prime Minister, and one of the most enthusiastic readers ever. In another mood she depicts her eight month old son devouring literature – literally. And she’s thoughtful on the not exactly snappily named The Mirror of True Womanhood: A Book of Instruction for Women in the World which she inherited from her grandmother.

She is hilarious about her own compulsive attachment to mail order catalogues especially when there is nothing else to read but where on earth do they come from? “Although it is tempting to conclude that our mailbox hatches them by spontaneous generation, I know that they are really the offspring of promiscuous mailing lists which copulate in secret and for money” I joyfully marked that sentence, as I read the book. Like Fadiman I am not much interested in the sanctity of bindings and paper – it’s the content I want. That’s why I’ve taken so readily to reading on a digital tablet, as perhaps Fadiman has by now too. You do, however, miss the scribbles, biscuit crumbs, stains and folds in the old editions which date from student days and have become part of a book’s history as well as of yours. She’s right about that.

It’s quite an art to be intelligent, accessible, thoughtful, funny and scholarly all at the same time but that’s what Fadiman achieves. Thank you, Rachel, You were right. Ex Libris and I were made for each other.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Daughters of the Late Colonel by Katherine Mansfield.

If someone gives you short shrift in a new fangled way it probably puts you on your mettle because you don’t want to eat humble pie or be hoist with your own petard. Common, easily understood expressions – but have you ever stopped to think about shrift, newfangled, mettle, humble pies and petard?

It’s actually very odd how often we unthinkingly use words without knowing what they mean. We’re confident that getting away with an exploit scot-free is to achieve something vaguely risky without incurring any penalty, payment or injury but what exactly was, or is, a scot (as opposed to a Scot which is a native of Scotland)? It was an English municipal tax, or the payment or levying of it, and it comes from an old Norse word skot meaning a shot or contribution.

Words are organic. They develop. They are born, they live and they die. The life cycle of a word often spans a millennium or more. But sometimes they retain a last gasp of immortality by living on in the language idiomatically, the lexical equivalent of a biological throwback.

‘My teenage children are beginning to kick against the traces’ you might hear a parent say. Kicking against the what? A trace was one of two straps chains or lines of a harness for attaching a horse to a vehicle and the word comes via Old French from the Latin word tractus, which is the past participle of the verb trahere to pull or to draw. A lad (or lass) who is kicking over the traces is therefore resisting restraint. Still in the realms of bestial metaphor, he or she might just as easily be kicking against the pricks – or not responding to being prodded by the sort of spurs or goads used to control domestic animals in the past.

So what actually was short shrift? Remember Romeo and Juliet? The Nurse has to find a plausible way of getting Juliet out of the house with minimum supervision and fuss as cover for her secret marriage to Romeo. ‘Have you got leave to go to shrift today?’ she asks in perfectly balanced iambic pentameter. Shrift was confession of sins and the granting of absolution so it meant a convenient private appointment with a priest. The past participle of this delicious word was ‘shriven’ and the associated adjective ‘shrove,’

In Britain the Tuesday before the first day of Lent (Mardi Gras in most of Europe and the US ) is still called Shrove Tuesday because it was the day on which it really was essential to get a sin-free clean slate with which to begin of the Lenten fast.

Anyone who got ‘short shrift’ received very little time and sympathy from the priest and so felt put out. And that’s what getting short shrift still means. Someone who gives it to you is not giving you the time and attention you think you deserve.

New-fangled is a nice word too. Laden with negative connotations, it means, of course, modern and unnecessarily complicated or gimmicky. It stems from the Old English word fangen, the past participle of fon – to take or seize. Thomas Wyatt’s early 16^th century poem ‘They Flee From Me’ describes his former lover leaving him to ‘use newfangleness.’

Mettle – that you might be put on – is just an alternative to ‘metal’ meaning strength or defensive, but humble pie and that petard that you, like Hamlet, might be hoist with, are interesting.

Obliged to eat humble pie, means you have no choice but to abase or humble yourself by apologising. The expression is actually a pleasing pun on an obsolete word. ‘Humples’ were the offal of deer and anything made with them was very lowly, or humble, food. So if you put yourself in the wrong you must swallow your pride as if you were eating this unglamorous dish.

A petar or petard comes form a jolly, Early French word peter which means to fart. It was a case for carrying explosives for military detonation and later it came to mean a firework with a loud report. To be ‘hoist’ with it means in effect that you’ve blown yourself up with your own bomb or yourself suffer from a misfortune you were planning for someone else. Hamlet, through whom Shakespeare coined the phase, meant that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are in the pay of the King Claudius to despatch Hamlet to a watery grave in the middle of the North Sea, would be outwitted and themselves drown instead.

And while we’re on the subject of Hamlet, what about that useful old suffix –monger from Old English manger, itself from the Latin mango, mangonis – a dealer, especially in slaves. It now means a trader or dealer, or a person who attempts to stir up something petty or disreputable. That’s why Hamlet, in his simulated madness, pretends to think that the obnoxious Polonius is a fishmonger. The old trade names such as fishmonger and ironmonger have all but died out now, but we still use the suffix in coinages like war-monger or lie-monger.

One of the interesting things about the mangere-derived monger is that, surprisingly, it has no etymological kinship with the two separate meanings of ‘mangle.’ A mangle, meaning a machine with rollers for pressing the water out of laundry, comes from a Dutch word mangel via High German and Middle High German and originally from Latin manganum from the Greek manganon, a pulley block.

Mangle, on the other hand, meaning to hack, crunch or spoil, comes from an Old French verb maynier to maim.

Another delightful word which survives idiomatically, but not otherwise, is fettle. If you’re in fine fettle you’re fit and ready for action. It originates in the Middle English verb fetten, to shape or prepare, which in turn developed from the Old English word fetel, a girdle. So the sense is that if you’re appropriately belted you’re ready for anything. But don’t try taking your filthy lucre (from the Latin lucrum, a gain and related to ‘lucrative’) and asking for a fetel in your local department store.

If you do, you might end up with a pig in a poke – the most attractive thing about which is the monosyllabic alliteration. What use would a pig be to anyone if it were small enough to fit in a pocket? A poke – which often had female sexual connotations because of its hollowness – is an old form of the word ‘pocket’ and both are related to ‘pouch’ from the Middle English poket and Early French pokete.

And while on the subject of alliterative plosives do you ever describe anyone or anyone as ‘plain as a pikestaff’? If so, do you actually know what a pikestaff was? It was a spiked walking stick for use in picking your way across slippery ground – a practical safety device, not renowned for beauty. It was also the staff of a foot soldier’s pike, a weapon consisting of a long rod with a pointed steel head. An unlovely item, its name derives from early French piquer, to pick and originally, rather charmingly, from the Latin word for woodpecker picus.

Ramshackle is a faintly onomatopoeic word meaning badly constructed, in need of repair or falling down. It is the past participle, and only surviving part, of the obsolete verb to ransackle [sic] although we still have the parent verb to ransack. Ransackle took a –le suffix because it was a frequentative. To ransackle was to ransack often, just as to suckle was to suck repeatedly and to sparkle was to spark again and again.

‘I believe in the quick and dead’ states the Apostles’ Creed. Quick meant living from Old English kwic, alive. That’s why, until recently, a mother or midwife would talk of an unborn baby ‘quickening’ once the pregnant woman had felt foetal movement. It also accounts for the expression ‘It cuts me to the quick’ meaning that the speaker is so deeply hurt that it’s as if living flesh is damaged.

So one way and another you probably need to watch what you say – or mind your Ps and Qs. Your what? There are three possibilities. Perhaps the expression came from telling children learning to write to take particular care with two easily confused letters. But the explanation that in ale houses customers would order pints and quarts (two pints) and have therefore to look carefully at the bill when it came, is much more fun. Better still is the theory that Ps and Qs were pieds (feet) and queues (wigs) at the French court of Louis XIV who reigned from 1643 to 1715. Dancing masters would tell their pupils to mind their Ps and Qs when bending low to bow formally.

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The Loaf

4 stars

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Owners

3 stars

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