When my husband’s whisky glass fell off the little table next to his chair on to next door’s cat, which was on an unauthorised visit, provoking it to make a speedy exit, en route scratching the postman, who had for a change that afternoon rung the bell to deliver a parcel instead of putting a little card through the door saying we were out, it was, my husband averred, a perfect storm. He really meant he had fallen asleep and let his copy of The Spectator fall.
We are in a perfect storm of perfect storms. ‘A perfect storm has arisen due to a combination of factors relating to Brexit and the pandemic,’ wrote someone in the Times about the petrol shortage. I fear the tempest will blow more perfectly yet.
I had thought that perfect storm derived from Sebastian Junger’s novel The Perfect Storm, published in 1997 and made into a film in 2000.
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