Last Saturday Simon Goodale congratulated us on getting his Times to him during the bad weather, and asked what the secret was.
Peter Shears promptly e-mailed: “Here in Lewes the nature of this ‘secret’ has been apparent to anyone up and about early. Whilst many of their adult customers enjoyed an extra hour in bed, courtesy of the snow and ice, our paperboys and girls trudged uncomplainingly through deep snow and over icy pavements to ensure that the work of all those who write, print and distribute The Times could reach your readers in time for breakfast. My own son has been getting up at 6am for precisely this purpose. Their determination should not go unnoticed.”
Quite right; consider this the Times’s official salute to Britain’s paperboys and girls. (I speak with some authority. Snowed in for several days at home, with our village shop unable to deliver papers, I trudged up the lane three mornings running, collected my and my neighbours’ newspapers, trudged back down and did all the deliveries myself. Those papers are HEAVY. I wouldn’t have minded but they don’t all take The Times; how’s that for sacrifice?)
Nurdling
Anthony W. Jury e-mails: “Can I bring up an earlier subject, so well covered, re unusual words that can mean so much? One from my past has just made the big time: the lovely multi-purpose ‘nurdle’. I take it to mean to manipulate with great skill or to fit in place precisely (I am a retired engineer). In Richard Hobson’s informed piece following the third Test in South Africa (Sport, January 8), he quotes Paul Collingwood’s gritty response to a TV interviewer seeking the player’s favourite stroke. Instead of offering a ‘derring-do’ response, Collingwood replied: ‘Nurdle down to third man.’ Magic!” Pity there wasn’t a bit more nurdling going on last Thursday, eh?
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Strait is the gate
Richard J. Browne writes from Surrey: “On two occasions in Tuesday’s issue journalists used the suffix ‘-gate’ to indicate a scandal connected to a particular person or place, in this case Iris Robinson. Is it not time to cease this irritating practice? After some 38 years this clich? is somewhat stale.”
Stale it may be, but it remains such effective shorthand that I sympathise with journalists’ attachment to it.
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Moral sin
Gaffe of the week from last Saturday, greatly enjoyed by many, including Victoria Dennis: “Matthew Syed’s musing on the infinity of pi and eternal life ended with the sentiment: ‘In the same way that Mr Bellard got no closer to a solution of pi with his mathematical feats, those who strive for immorality will get no closer to the meaning they crave.’ Possibly true (my husband commented, ‘Maybe, but the striving can be lots of fun’), just not the statement Mr Syed intended to make.”
Michael Cole spotted some dodgy geography in a TV review of Wallander: “That the dead man was a villain and it was self-defence was not going to dissuade Kurt from a self-imposed sabbatical grimly watching the Atlantic waves.” Tricky to see the Atlantic from southern Sweden, says Mr Cole; easier to see the Baltic.
And an own goal in last week’s column, picked up by Richard Lindley, of Winchester, among others: “‘The report about feeding in care homes was repeated on two different pages ... ‘ So it actually appeared three times on Wednesday, did it? Not in fact a double, but a triple!” Mea culpa.