I love staring – in a non-sexual way - Giles Wood

In the past, texts of a religious or improving nature hung on every cottage wall.

Victorian needlework-samplers might typically remind the occupants to ‘Honour thy father and thy mother’. Thence to basements in the pot-smoking 1970s, where posters of the saccharine poem Desiderata (‘Go placidly amid the noise and haste’) seemed to endorse the passivity of the ‘basementals’ gazing on.