Mind Your Language | 5 July 2003

I was just looking up malarkey when my husband called out in the tones of a man who has found a glass eye in his porridge. ‘Looks like yours,’ he said, fishing a bit of paper out of the first volume of Phineas Finn as if with tongs. He was not wrong, it had my writing on it, and I wish I had found the note before, when Sir Ned Sherrin wrote about morning meaning ‘afternoon’.