Here's a riddle to change the subject: what English catch-phrase, indicating someone is better than he seems, would also apply to a yacht owner whose… - Patrick Leigh Fermor

Meanwhile, the kittens - downholsterers and interior desecrators to a kitten - demolish all.

Germany! . . . I could hardly believe I was there. For someone born in the second year of World War I, those three syllables were heavily charged. Even as I trudged across it, early subconscious notions, when one first confused Germans with germs and knew that both were bad, still sent up fumes; fumes, moreover, which the ensuing years had expanded into clouds as dark and baleful as the Ruhr smoke along the horizon and still potent enough to unloose over the landscape a mood of - what? Something too evasive to be captured and broken down in a hurry.

Many thanks for both letters, which arrived two days running, a tremendous treat for Kalamata, a town nobody writes to. I think people are subconsciously repelled by the letter K. It's the reverse of the letter X, which always goes to people's heads. Perhaps if sex were spelt seks or segs there wouldn't be half so much fuss about it: nothing very glamorous about segs kittens or seksual intercourse but write `sex killer slays six' and you're in business . . .