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.
‘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’.
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