Aunt

Catching up with the excellent biography of the 3rd Marquess of Bute (the man who built Cardiff Castle among other eccentricities) by Rosemary Hannah, I came across this seasonal horror for Stir Up Sunday. In the Greek islands that Bute toured, they laid out grapes to dry as currants.

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‘The beds these currants are laid to dry on,’ he wrote, ‘are thickly smeared with dung, not fresh, but the real cess pool business, including, I think, our own aunt as well as that of other animals, in an advanced state of corruption… They say it keeps the currants hot below, and I daresay it does — but it don’t stimulate one’s appetite for plum pudding.’ This memorable passage contains a euphemism that I had not met for decades, and certainly not in an aristocratic setting: aunt meaning ‘excrement’.