Yesterday was what we call sailor-hat day in the town where we live: the day when graduating high-school students wearing naval-style caps parade round the streets celebrating on impromptu floats bedecked with birch-boughs. As I recall, my last day at school was a much lower-key affair: we did...

They dined on mince, and slices of quince, / Which they ate with a runcible spoon—Lear, The Owl and the Pussycat. To me, as a child, quince might just as well have been as much a made-up word as runcible: I had never seen such a thing, much less dined on slices of one. Last year, in one of the...

As a child I affected to despise perfumes, and would claim I was allergic to them: they made me want to sneeze. Ours wasn’t a family of fragrant sophisticates: my mother sometimes wore Lenthéric’s Tweed, and, later, Panache; and my father might have splashed on some Old Spice or Brut 33 before...