I was rolling out some pastry that had been cooling its pudgy heels in the fridge when voices on the wireless began discussing whether Priti Patel would roll out ‘controversial new tactics to turn migrants back mid-Channel’. I felt that our rolling roles belonged to different realms.
For pastry, I have a rolling pin. How does one go about rolling out tactics? I had thought that such things might be rolled out as though they were barrels. That depressing song from the beginning of the war (as we still call it) urges us to ‘roll out the barrel. We’ll have a barrel of fun.’
If not a barrel, then perhaps a carpet is the figurative thing. We have been rolling out red carpets for 200 years, though not necessarily in those exact terms. In George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, at Sir Hugo Mallinger’s New Year’s ball, ‘red carpet was laid down for the occasion: hot-house plants and evergreens were arranged in bowers’.
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