Status-Q

We’re always amused by impressive-sounding descriptions which include sufficient qualifications to be almost meaningless. Rose just sent me this one:

“Lavenham is perhaps one of England’s finest preserved medieval weaving villages”

Almost every word, after the first two, is a restriction. Let’s read them backwards:

• We’re looking at villages here, not cities, towns or hamlets.

• They need to be primarily associated with weaving.

• Medieval weaving, that is. Or perhaps medieval villages. In any case, other periods need not apply.

• Their character has been preserved.

• Rather well preserved, in fact.

• Only English ones, mind you. None of your Belgian weavers, for the moment.

• There may be more than one village meeting all of the above.

• Lavenham may be one of them.

• Perhaps.

Well, I think we can agree on that.

I like the way our parish church puts a card through our door each festive season:

Easter Greetings from St Mark’s Church
Barton Road, Newnham
(Next to the Red Bull)

We do, indeed, live in a more secular age!

Claire Underwood, the wife of the president in the splendid new House of Cards, expresses distress that a prisoner she was trying to help had hung himself in his cell.

Except, of course, he didn’t. He hanged himself.

Meat is hung. Pictures are hung. People, however, are hanged, at least when it’s in the sense of ‘put to death by hanging’.

There. It’s good to get that off my chest. Thank you for listening.

Two things I can’t remember:

• Just how many weeks and months I spent, as a child, learning handwriting.

• When (beyond inscribing a simple signature and a date) I last needed that skill.

Mmm.

Gun-related homicides in the U.S. run at approximately 10,000 per year.

It’s a big country, but that was higher than I expected. For comparison, it’s about 40 times the per-capita rate in the UK.

What surprised me more was that annual gun-related suicides are nearly twice that. Which seems like a really big number.

Interestingly, per-capita suicides in the US are only about 10% higher than here. But half of them involve guns.

Apologies for the grim reading, but I thought the numbers were interesting.

Here’s a very pleasing article by Rachael Steven about Robert Green’s quest to recreate a lost classic.

A fundamental design requirement of bath taps, it seems to me (though I’ve never seen it formally specified anywhere) is that they should be controllable with the toes.

At a dinner last week, I was sitting opposite a bishop – a most genial fellow, who was telling us about the accommodation that one could expect at Sandringham, and the rather lower level of comfort available at most ecclesiastical gatherings.

He talked particularly about the challenges they had finding good lodgings for all the single bishops. In fact, the phrase, "all the single bishops" came up so often that I was transported into a momentary daydream, where a room full of bishops danced to a Beyoncé beat. "All the single bishops, all the single bishops". The purple robes glowed bright as they twisted and spun, and as the beat reached its peak, they all reached out their right hands to the archbishop at the centre of the circle. "If you like it then you should have put a ring on it…"