‘You can do a lot of things at the seaside that you can’t do in town,’ sang my husband in a gurgling tone produced by a recent pull at his whisky glass.
‘You can do a lot of things at the seaside that you can’t do in town,’ sang my husband in a gurgling tone produced by a recent pull at his whisky glass. His outburst was a sort of distillery-sponsored tourettist parody of an innocent sentence I had just spoken: ‘You hear a lot of words at elections that you don’t hear all year.’
It’s funny that elections have always been held on a Thursday (at least, since 1935), for an old word for Maundy Thursday was Mandate Thursday. Those names come, of course, from the mandatum novum, the new commandment that Christ gave the Apostles. The mandate that voters give to MPs is of a more dubious status.
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