unearths some literary gems.
***
[He] goes to the opera till he's blue in the face.
***
[The most hyperpolite Brit ever?]
The message on my answering machine to invite me to lunch, went: "Could you bear to give me a ring if the idea of having lunch with me isn't absolute anathema to you?"
[...]
"Would you mind passing me the menu if it isn't the most frightful bore?" he said to me. Then: "Oh, how splendid!" to the waiter when he brought the sparkling water. "How frightfully kind!"
***
[Imaginary Hats dept.]
On our way out we saw a big man’s black hat lying in the corridor.
[….]
We both imagined this wretched man going around pompously, imagining he’d got his ludicrous hat on his head, and then going home and looking in the mirror and finding to his horror that he’d been strutting around all day just an ordinary person with a small, bald head.
***
"I know, darling!"
The "darling" just slipped out.
"I didn't mean 'darling, darling,'" I tried to explain...."It's a kind of...expression, that has come upon me at sixty like a kind of disease. My speech is peppered with darlings. Darlings, not dahlings with an 'h,'" I added. "There's nothing I can do about it."
***
