Dot Wordsworth

The normalisation of ‘normalcy’

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issue 23 March 2024

My husband devotes his decreasing hours of daytime wakefulness to looking at Twitter, as he still calls it. He shouted out, ‘Look at this’, just as I was putting the potatoes in the oven to roast. It was a post criticising the ENO for saying 2021 was ‘a year spent slowly returning to normalcy’. The author said, ‘Brits don’t use the word normalcy’. Is that true?

In 1899, on leaving Eton at the age of 17, Evelyn Wrench was well on his way to making a fortune from selling picture postcards at tourist spots. Then he overstretched himself and went bust in 1904. Instead he turned his energies to promoting the British Empire. In 1922 he began writing for The Spectator, becoming its editor from 1925. Early in his Spectator career, he commented on the election of November 1922, notable for making Labour the opposition and for Churchill, as a National Liberal, losing his seat to a prohibitionist – prohibition of alcohol, that is.

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