(no subject)

On the morning train down to Sussex there’s a group of men in light grey suits heading off for a day at Goodwood.

Man 1: When did you tell your wife you’d be coming home?
Man 2: Tomorrow. I told her she could cook her own dinner.
Man 3: My missus said to me, “Just don’t forget I exist”. When I go out on the lash I forget to call her or text her or anything, and then when I get home I get a right bollocking.
Man 4: Fuck her, she’s too needy!
Man 2: Watch your language, Phil. There’s kids in this carriage.
Man 4: Sorry. [To the woman sat opposite him:] Sorry about that. [She shrugs.]
Man 3: Yeah, watch that. We’re going to be in the posh esclosure today.
Man 1: Esclosure?
Man 3: Esclosure.
Man 1: It’s enclosure, Wayne. Jesus Christ.

A wedding where two of the bridesmaids were in their early 30s but the third was two years old, while the best man was the groom’s seven year-old nephew, was not going to be an occasion where “we respectfully ask people not to bring children”. Rather, the couple had gracefully accepted the fact that among their circle of friends there were at least 15 children of infant age and so held their reception at a country park near Havant that’s full of animals, meaning that years from now there will still be kids saying to them, “Oh my God you had the best wedding you had rabbits”. Also: alpacas, a Shetland pony and a two week-old pig in a bucket.

We were all gathered in a courtyard in the afternoon sun. A guest I had been chatting to said, “Excuse me, I’m going to find my wife.” He scanned the crowd of about 60 guests. “Or perhaps not,” he added, and looked around some more. “I have this knack,” he said glumly, “of failing to pick my wife out of a crowd. The most recent time, we were in a small branch of PC World. We had agreed that if we couldn’t find what we were after, we’d go into the shop over the road. I finished, looked around the place for her and couldn’t find her, so went to the other shop. There was no sign of her there either so I came out again, at which point Jane was just coming out of PC World saying, ‘Where the hell were you?’”

He hadn’t mentioned his wife’s name before; I had met her earlier. “Oh, you’re Jane’s husband?” I said. “Jane, who’s… just there?” She was indeed no more than five feet away from him, talking to my mother. “Oh God,” he said, “not again. Please don’t tell her.” Should I alert Oliver Sacks?

Body Heat

From the Second Reading of the Perpetuities and Accumulations Bill:

Baroness Deech: My one claim to fame is that I used to lecture on [perpetuities and accumulations]; I did so for 20 years at Oxford. In a course of eight one-hour lectures we did no more than merely scrape the surface of the subject, and at the end of those eight hours I used to forget it until the following year came around... I doubt whether this subject is widely taught or known, and I suspect—indeed, this has been said quite authoritatively in other common-law jurisdictions—that wills are drawn up by lawyers in complete ignorance and carried out in the same way. There is an American film called “Body Heat”, starring Kathleen Turner, where the entire plot turns on the failure to notice the application of the rule against perpetuities in a will, although I suspect that I was the only person in the audience to have been overcome with excitement at that point.

New York Harbor

“What lies beneath the surface of New York Harbor? For starters, a 350-foot steamship, 1,600 bars of silver, a freight train, and four-foot-long cement-eating worms.”