I’ve long thought that simply saying to someone ‘Don’t worry’, is both pointless and infuriating. If only it were that easy to switch off our anxiety. Besides, there’s sometimes good cause for us to feel apprehensive, even if we know full well that the worry doesn’t achieve anything. Recently, however, I was struck by 2 …
I haven’t got a clue
Foreign Languages are not a strength of mine. My schoolgirl French is pitiful and my brief efforts at German have dwindled to a single, decidedly odd, phrase: ‘Ich habe keine ahnung.’ If your German is even worse than mine, this means ‘I haven’t got a clue’ – perhaps not the most useful phrase if I …
Summer reading
Heading off on holiday I looked for a diverting novel and landed upon Kate Mosse’s Labyrinth, a best seller of 20 years ago, which was appealingly reviewed as ‘chick lit with A levels’! That proved an apt description as the pacy plot also taught me a considerable amount about religion in 13th Century France when …
Just my bread and butter
As a phrase, ‘my bread and butter’ refers to our most basic needs and interests, what we require just to get by, but has the ‘ordinariness’ of this foodstuff meant we’ve forgotten to value it as much as we should? As someone who hates waste, I always use up everything. I’d have been, in that …