‘Don’t mind if I do,’ is one of husband’s stock phrases — jokes he would think them — in this case trotted out if anyone says, of the weather, ‘Bitter’. (The joke must come from Colonel Chinstrap in ITMA, even though my husband wasn’t born then.)
Mr Verdant Green, notionally at Oxford in the mid 19th-century, called drinking bitter beer ‘doing bitters’, a bit of slang he picked up from Mr Bouncer. We don’t say that any more, but we still enjoy bitter beer, despite the Oxford English Dictionary defining the adjective as ‘causing “the proper pain of taste” (Bain)’.
By ‘Bain’ it means Alexander Bain (1818–1903), as if that were obvious. Perhaps it was so in 1887 when the entry was written. Bain was a psychologist at Aberdeen, one of whose better acts was to defeat Randolph Churchill for the rectorship.
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