Who knew that power cuts are still going strong in the Tarrant Valley?
‘I’m not going to beg you,’ said my wife one recent evening when I was visiting her at her picturesque thatched cottage in a rural Dorset village, ‘because I value my dignity. I am going to gently request that you rein the hysteria in.’ I commented on neither the split infinitive nor the sentence-ending preposition. Becca’s tone plainly implied that this would be very much the kind of archaic pedantry up with which she had extremely little intention of putting. What I did was point out that 33 years of holy wedlock (the last dozen insulated by a buffer zone of 104 miles and five or six counties) had surely taught her how eerily calm I become in a genuine crisis. ‘All I will say,’ I went on, ignoring the derisive snort before paraphrasing Sir Edward Grey at the dawn of the First World War, ‘is that the lamps are...
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