‘Quicksand!’ yelled my husband, flailing his arms wildly. Since he was sitting in his armchair, his dramatic representation of a scene from a western failed to convince, though it endangered the tumbler of whisky on the occasional table next to him.
He’d been set off (not that it takes much) by my mentioning the ubiquity of struggling. Instead of the hard-working families that we were forever being told about, it is now struggling families, torn between having another pie for tea or turning on the heating in these sweltering days.
Everyone is struggling. ‘Mateo Kovacic is struggling with knee problems,’ the Telegraph told me. Others are ‘struggling to care for dogs with health and behavioural problems’.
But there is a new kind of struggling, which seems to mean what you or I would call failing. The Sun had a sort of ‘spot the pigeon’ game in which the birds were scarcely visible on a ledge.
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