“You'll be able now to give it as your considered opinion that [Wilbert Cream] is as loony as a coot, Sir Roderick.” A pause ensued during which [the psychiatrist] appeared to be weighing this, possibly thinking back to coots he had met in the course of his professional career and trying to estimate their dippiness as compared with that of W. Cream.

It is the illicit Christmas pudding an incorrigible servant cooks for the little boy one Christmas Day that sparks Oscar's first crisis of belief, for his father, opposed to Christmas pudding on theological grounds, makes the child vomit his helping.

By far the most important fitting issue for sleeves, whether for a woman's shirt or a man's, is length, and that's probably the only part of the shirt sleeve that's bothered you if it wasn't right.

So that over and above the public components – holidays, tourist attractions – there are private meanderings, linked to the climate as if this spell were a stretto passage in the year’s fugue: haphazard weather, aimless loves, unpredicted commitments…